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Have you ever had a friend who makes plans to hang out but cancels when a better offer comes along? Or a buddy who helped you through a bad breakup, then flirted with your ex? To scientists, these problematic pals are known as ambivalent friends. To a more slang-savvy crowd, they are called “frenemies.”
Either term has come to describe a range of complicated relationships—those that boost you up and bring you down, for any of a variety of reasons. They include the well-meaning friend who is overly competitive, the pal who is a pillar of support when times are tough but cannot quite take pleasure in your successes, and the college buddy who drops everything to lend you a hand when you need one but gossips about you later.
In these troublesome relationships, qualities such as warmth and understanding go hand-in-hand with criticism, jealousy or rejection. “It’s a friend who drives you nuts,” says Karen Fingerman, a psychologist at Purdue University. “You love them, you don’t want to lose them, but they’re really a pain.”
Researchers have only recently begun examining these mixed-emotion associations. So far they are finding that such ties have negative effects on mental and physical well-being, boosting blood pressure and risk of depression while lowering resistance to stress. But if you want to keep your frenemies—and most people do—you can minimize these effects by buffering your interactions with the mixed-weather friends and considering impartial reasons for their hurtful behavior.
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