I recently ran into a woman I knew from work years ago. She had performed random acts of kindness but sometimes sounded too shallow. Now here she was again. "Hi, "she said, smiling. "How are you?"Like a fool, I rushed to tell her everything I had been doing.
The woman interrupted me. "That's great. I'm so happy to hear you've finally sorted your life out. "And off she went, leaving me speechless. I tossed and turned that night, thinking about what she had meant. She didn't know anything about my life, so why had she said that?
I finally recognised psychologist Adam Grant's idea about frenemies — those"supposed friends who sometimes help you and sometimes hurt you. "Not for nothing did Grant write: "The most toxic relationships aren't the purely negative ones. They're the ones that are a mixof positive and negative. "
Avoiding these connections whenever possible is probably a good idea, but how do we distinguish frenemies from other friends? Human behaviorist Vanessa Van Edwards has identified three different types of frenemy.
The first is the easiest to detect — the jealous(嫉妒的) frenemy. "On the surface, they want you to succeed but they will gossip about you behind your back and are jealous of your accomplishments and successes, "Vanessa says.
The second type of frenemy is what she calls the undermining(暗中破坏的) frenemy. You think they're on your side and then they start making indirect, unkind comments in front of the boss. The undermining frenemy operates outside the office, too. For example, you tell a friend that you want to lose weight. Are they going to cheer you on or invite you to a bad brunch and bring you a cupcake?
The third type is the hardest to detect, labelled by Van Edwards as the unsure frenemy. She believes that this type of connection has become increasingly common thanks to social media. "Particularly when you have a lot of interactions online with wider social groups, it can be really difficult to know where a person fits in your life. We like each other's posts online with each other. But I'm not sure I like you, " Van Ed-wards explains.
