A personal relationship on the basis of mutual favours usually opens with small-scale activities. Kindnesses, offers of help, and small gifts which cost nothing are proffered in a form which leaves room for tactful rejection. The relationship can only be deepened when acts of friendship have been reciprocated, when there is a spark of grateful recognition, and when the relationship has stood the test of everyday coming and going. It can then involve larger gifts, and, because each person trusts the other, can sustain a long, drawn-out imbalance. At this stage of development, immediate and exactly gauged reciprocation becomes a sign of distrust, because the person acting in this way presents himself as someone wanting to extricate himself as soon as possible from the bonds of gratitude.

XREF: Connects to Marcel Mauss's gift exchange theory and the concept of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 201