Warning: about to derail this thread.
See, the exchange you just explained between you and your husband's CW's wife is a tragedy of our age, in my opinion, @Pioneerw2b.
What in the world is happening to people? When did it become appropriate to co-opt friendship into a business opportunity? Even worse, a horrible, exploitative one that doesn't even work (let's just call it what it is: a SCAM).
Here's a perfectly good budding friendship between two women that could grow into something that would be mutually beneficial to both parties. You enjoy each other's company, and maybe slowly but surely develop into a relationship where you're helping each other out, having each other over for get-togethers, exchanging recipes...one of you has some kind of crisis, the other one is there for you...you know, all the lovely, selfless things that FRIENDSHIPS used to be for.
And this woman totally isolates herself from any of that good stuff by making a budding friendship all about yet another MLM scam. It's bad for society. Now you're going to (rightfully) avoid her and never get to know her, and the husbands are going to feel a little awkward about it at work. It's a crying shame and I hate those companies for ruining the building block of community: friendship.
They promote the notion that "financial good for me" is far better than "long-term emotional good for both of us".
In order to be successful at MLM, people either have to either buy into that way of thinking, or sell a flaming metric ton of product because they have vast frienships networks where it's a relatively new, untapped market and where people actualy think the products are cool and want to buy them. The latter situation is extremely rare.
"Financial good for me is far better than long-term emotional good for both of us" is utterly ridiculous logic. Not that you are arguing for that, @TheGrimSqueaker, but I'm getting a little wound up about the horribly misguided thinking that the statement represents on the part of MLM people.
Here's what they don't understand: good long-term friendships actually have enormous economic value. It's crass to think of friendship in economic terms, but it's the truth. A good network of friends has helped me out of so many jams and done me so many favors. I've done the same for them, of course. When I had my first baby, at least fifteen people brought us meals over a two month period. Same for my second. We swap babysitting with friends. Potluck meals all the time. Mental health in the form of feeling like there are people close by who know me and care about me. Our kids play together...
To trade all that in order to try to recruit a bunch of suckers to be your "downline" while you ostensibly sell them a couple of shrink wrap nails or some face cream ...it completely blows my mind. It's awful. How are people that dumb?
People are that dumb because they have a lower level of maturity and social awareness. They also don't understand social capital.
The interdependence you so eloquently describe is possible only in a community of people who share, take turns, and give to one another knowing that, in their time of need, they will be similarly taken care of. You and your friends have enormous social capital with one another and a great deal of trust and respect. Yet it didn't develop overnight. A new person joining your network will most likely be welcomed, but will not necessarily be given to at the same level as someone such as yourself without proving his or her willingness to contribute.
Babies and small children begin in a state of dependence: "feed me!" is how they operate because they aren't yet able to fend for themselves. As a child ages, they become more independent and seek to feed themselves. But a still higher level of human development comes when people realize-- as you and your friends have done-- that they gain more by cooperating with reliable members of their community than they do by going it alone. And yes, you're completely right about the goods and services exchanged sometimes having a high dollar value particularly over the long term. But in order to attain that benefit, human beings must be intellectually and emotionally developed enough to recognize that life isn't a zero-sum game. Not everyone reaches that level of development. Some get stuck at "independent" and go it alone, at least for a while, and others get stuck at "feed me, Seymour!"
Someone who believes what I mentioned above-- that short-term financial benefit outweighs the benefits of a long-term mutually agreeable friendship-- is stuck at a very low level of emotional development. This is a parasitic creature, possibly destined for the entitlement class, and usually lacking in logic skills also. Such people frequently make a living on the benefit of other people's doubt and are prone to self-destructive habits that keep them in an artificial state of financial dependence on others.
Shared activities, favors done, gifts exchanged, and hospitality reciprocated are things that build social capital between people. It is not entirely a matter of social debt, so much as a combination of respect and goodwill. Now, social capital can be converted into money: charities do it all the time through fund raising. But it works for direct marketing too. Many a set of Cutco knives or fake nails have been sold to people simply because a close friend of family member asks them to buy. Yet social capital is
renewable but finite. It can be lost, lent to others, and exchanged for money, but I use the analogy of an artesian well when I think about social capital. If you take more out of a relationship than you give to it, the well eventually runs dry. The relationship may be permanently damaged by asking too much from somebody, and the damage isn't always repairable. If you take more out of a community than the community generates by itself, the aquifer that feeds all the wells in the community is depleted and cannot always replenish itself. That's the concept that MLM devotees just don't understand. By trying to constantly monetize relationships, especially before the relationships are well established, they destroy not just their relationships with individuals but the stability of the community itself.
(See? The thread didn't actually derail.)