<< My answer to this problem is yes and no. Whether borrowing money harms our friendship or stimulates our friendship depends on each situations. If we borrow money from friends and don't pay the money back, that would harm our friendship. On the other hand, borrowing money itself means an intimate friendship. We can't ask every friends to borrow us money. We can only borrow money from our close friends. In daily lives, sometimes we have to borrow money from our friends. Sometimes we don't have enough money but we have to pay more money than we have. Say, when we go to a restaurant with several friends, but if we don't have money at the time, do we give up having lunch with them? In most cases, we borrow money from our friends, that is just a 10 dollars or so. 10 dollars itself is not a much money. But the 10 dollars borrowed from friends is a much money if we forget to pay the money back. In such a case, the friend remember lending you 10 dollars, even though you happenly forget the fact. Of course only that can't damage our friendship. But you borrow money and forget to pay the money back frequently, you will lose your credit to your friends. On the other hand, borrowing money strengthens or means our good friendship. That is, we don't borrow money from unknown friends. In Japan, it is usually said that we can't have erotic talk with unintimate friends. In other words, when we talk about sex with friends, the friends are close relationship with you. The same can be applied to borrowing money. In relation to money, we sometimes pay the check of our friends when having lunch. Such a paying means some gratitude to the friend. We don't like to be paid wihout reason. Without any practical reason, if your friend takes your check, you might be harmed your feeling. However close our friendships are, we have to independent financially. Only exception is our family. Within our family, we don't care much about the owner of money. When going for a lunch with family, we don't care whether father or mother pays. But friends are not our family however we like them. To have a good relationship, we have to pay back the money we borrowed from our friends. We can't make good friends in a short period. To have a close friend, we have to spend long time with them. Good friendship can't be established in a day. But such a friendship can easily be damaged only by just 10 dollars. Howerer sincerly we behave to our friends, if you are not sincerly about borrowing money, you will lose your credit to your friends. The word 'credit' itself sometimes equals to moeny. So if we want to have stand relationship with our friends, we have to take care of money.