I have a problem.
I have friends that I love to hate.
My "frenemies," as they are known, could also be affecting my health.
Don't get me wrong: I adore these people, but they just drive me crazy.
The worst of them is vain, conceited, and throws barely concealed insults at each other in every conversation.
He would ask me what was new, only to immediately start yawning emphatically.
"Boring!" he would then abruptly interrupt me, in a fake California girl accent (that might be acceptable on the West Coast, but this was in London).
It sounds harmless, but it would take me days to recover from.
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When, after years of dissatisfaction, I gathered the courage to cool our relationship, I was overcome by an inexplicable feeling of guilt and remorse, despite all the positive aspects I had begun to feel in the meantime.
He could be quite funny when I wasn't the subject of his jokes,
I've discovered that this type of friendship is starting to attract serious attention from psychologists.
They even have a technical term for them - "ambivalent relationships".
According to Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University in Utah, on average, half of our friendship network consists of people we both love and hate.
"It's rare to find someone who doesn't have at least one such ambivalent relationship," she says.
This could be a more serious problem than it seems at first glance.
Holt-Lunstad's work suggests that "frenemies" could be much more harmful than people you actively, unequivocally hate.
They could even harm your well-being and endanger your health.
So why do we continue to have these toxic friendships?
A support network
To understand this, we need to examine how our circle of friends can influence us.
It was most often believed that a mix of friends and acquaintances kept us safe.
Analyzing 150 published studies, Holt-Lunstad found that strong social ties reduce the risk of death to about the same extent as quitting smoking.
Being lonely is twice as harmful as being overweight.
How to?
Friends are supposed to help us relax and protect us from stress.
Stress raises blood pressure and increases the release of inflammatory molecules that could increase the risk of a whole range of ailments, while friends can help calm some of these reactions.
On the other hand, the misfortune of loneliness can itself intensify many of these processes and lead to other complications, such as, for example, insomnia.
There are, however, many nuances of friendship.
Robin Dunbar from the University of Oxford (the man behind Dunbar's number) suggests that fickle friends are an integral part of our evolution in large social groups.
You are always dealing with a range of conflicting interests.
"The problem is how to neutralize those stresses and allow the group to remain coherent over time," he says.
"You must, therefore, be prepared to flatter your allies, and this will necessarily include your false friends. Tolerate them in order to manage them better," he adds.
The instinct to keep our friends closer, and our enemies even closer, seems to have taken hold.
Previous studies examining the impact of our friends on our health did not address these nuances.
And so Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino from the University of Utah investigated whether the good qualities of a so-called friend outweigh the bad ones.
And they were shocked by what they discovered.
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Under pressure
In one of the first studies, they mapped volunteers' medium- to long-term friendship networks via questionnaires, then fitted them with blood pressure monitors, before returning the volunteers to the real world for a few days.
"Every time they interacted with someone, we would get a blood pressure reading," says Holt-Lunstad.
As you might expect, blood pressure was lower when people interacted with supportive friends, as opposed to "aversive" acquaintances - whether it was an abusive colleague or a moody boss.
The big surprise was that they blood pressure spiked the most when they were with their own ambivalent friends.
Later experiments only confirmed and expanded on these findings.
"Even when they're in the next room in the lab, they still have higher blood pressure and higher anxiety levels," says Holt-Lunstad.
"It was caused by the sheer compulsion to interact with them," he explains.
The least expected of all, preparing participants with subliminal signals (the name "frenemy" flashing on the screen) seemed to amplify some measures of stress, such as heart rate.
"This suggests that our relationships have an impact not only through direct interactions, but also through these less conscious experienced processes that operate all the time in everyday life," says Uchino.
Anything that reminds you of them could trigger those reactions in your body.
Blood pressure rises when talking to fake friends
In this way, false friends are among the most stressful people we encounter.
This is partly due to their unreliability.
"You feel a lot of uncertainty. You wonder if he'll be there when I need him or if he'll bring up some painful topic again?" she adds.
Uchino agrees, suggesting that our close, enduring relationships can make them even more painful than the people we actively try to avoid.
"They are almost a part of ourselves, and therefore what they do or say can have a much greater effect on us."
"Because of that, you have a much stronger emotional connection with them, and they have a better chance of hurting you," he says.
He thinks it would actually be easier for you to reject the disparagement of an unequivocal enemy, because it means much less to us.
"It's not just in the moment; you tend to think about painful conversations for longer periods of time afterward," says Uchino.
Disconnection
Uchina and Holt-Lunstad's studies have mostly focused on the short-term impacts of "frenemies," and now they'd like to explore how they stack up over years and decades.
Very few ongoing studies have collected data on the specific quality of people's relationships, but Uchino has some early, albeit circumstantial, evidence of damage to the volunteers' DNA.
Each chromosome in our cell ends with a DNA strand called a "telomere".
As we age, they tend to shrink, leaving the cell open to a whole range of problems, including the growth of cancer.
For this reason, telomere length is often used as a measure of cellular aging, and it is known to be affected by stress.
Uchino found that people with more ambivalent friends also had shorter telomeres.
If this is supported by further studies, we may all have to reexamine our own relationships and whether they are worth the upheaval they bring.
Unfortunately, it's not always easy to remove these people from your circle of friends, especially considering the fact that these are often lifelong friendships.
When Holt-Lunstad and Uchino asked people about the reasons they stayed in touch with their "frenemies," many spoke of feelings of loyalty.
"We feel a kind of attachment because we've known them for so many years," says Holt-Lunstad.
Others wanted to be more moral people than they were.
"There's a perception that you have to turn the other cheek, be better than them," he adds.
How to deal with "frenemies"?
The Effect's personal strategy is to talk to fake friends and explain to them what his problem is in the hope of reaching a mutual understanding.
"When you look at how people deal with their own ambivalent relationships, there's not a lot of direct initiative like that - we often lie to them, ignore them, or just avoid them."
He is also studying the possibility that meditation could be a good mechanism for dealing with this problem.
Several studies have shown that regularly meditating on the good aspects of your acquaintances, and even your "frenemies," can improve your psychological well-being and health.
But Uchino points out that the testing has been mostly modest and poorly controlled, so he would like to build on some more thorough studies.
When it comes to my personal friendships, one of Uchino's comments stuck in my head.
"We're all busy and we don't notice the signals that people need support, which could lead to both positive and negative feelings," he says.
It's not something I'll gladly admit, but I'm guilty of that.
By putting myself on a pedestal, I could be my own worst "frenemy."
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