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‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.’
It’s an oft-repeated piece of advice, one that well predates its memorable use by Michael Corleone in the 1974 movie masterpiece, The Godfather Part II. Nonetheless, studies now suggest it’s incomplete, in a significant way.
Missing is the deadliest relationship of them all: the frenemy.
‘We only give credit to those over 90 who bring a grandparent as guarantor.’ Or better yet, f**k off!
A friend in need
As the organisational psychologist Adam Grant, author of Think Again, put it in a recent New York Times opinion piece, ‘the most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative.’ (Read the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/frenemies-relationships-health.html.)
In that NY Times piece, Dr Grant cited research by the psychologists Bert Uchino and Julianne Holt-Lunstad that showed how ‘ambivalent relationships can be damaging to your health’.
The studies found that those interacting with people who evoked mixed feelings had higher blood pressure and increased heart rates than those interacting with people who evoked negative feelings only. Dealing with frenemies also appears to trigger depression.
I can certainly relate.
My current frenemy situation also ties in with an arguably more important maxim: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’
While the message is clear in that proverb from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, some of us still get duped into helping out a hard-up friend in need — a friend indeed, of course. They can be ever so convincing.
Yes, the potential borrower is also warned of hardships should he go ahead with the request but experience tells me that it’s the lender who ends up, well, more alone, disillusioned and utterly frustrated.
In working-class Colombia in any case, keeping your financial affairs in order is almost viewed as a negative. My previous piece, Rewarding the reckless, elaborates on my latest loan lament. Here I want to share the emotional torment of what must be a prime example of an ambivalent relationship.
‘Has it been this frenemy’s plan all along to drive me to a state of disillusionment where I’ll just give up?’
The friend-fast-becoming-frenemy to whom I lent money continues to tell me that he’s good for it. The original repayment deadline was on 15 February of this year. The money was lent on 12 December 2022.
To his, um, partial credit, he has paid back about a third of the principal.
However, over the last few weeks, it’s been a case of ‘mañana, mañana’, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’. He promises me he’ll repay the remainder or a portion of it on a certain day yet, thus far, when the appointed day arrives, nothing. Tomorrow never comes.
This constant failure to meet repayment dates — that he himself sets — both disappoints and infuriates me just as much as the fact that he still owes me money.
Toxic
I lent him this cash because we had similar dealings previously. He always paid back — not always on the date originally specified but never more than a month late. So I trusted him. That trust has now been shattered. When it comes to his promises of paying me back on a particular date, I simply can’t believe him.
Of course, he has excuses. Chief amongst them is that he isn’t getting paid for work he has done. That may indeed be true; it most likely is in these parts.
However, he still has money to socialise regularly and liberally — Bogotá isn’t short of freeloaders should one be so obliging. And he can still fuel his car, a car that is far from essential for his work. If he is in hard times, he’s putting the sunny side out; and then some.
All this betrays his constant cries that he’s ‘embarrassed’ that he hasn’t paid me back yet and that he truly values our friendship. In addition, I have to do the chasing. If he really did see me as a good buddy, should he not be doing his utmost to reassure me that everything will be fine?
For sure, over the last number of years, we have shared many moments that, at face value, point to genuine friendship.
Yet, colder, deeper analysis suggests it has been nothing more than an ambivalent relationship. It just took this incident — plus my reading of Dr Grant’s article — to realise its true toxicity.
That I’m keeping it on a life-support machine is solely for the money owed to me. If it was for a lesser amount, I would write it off as a bad debt, cut ties with the borrower and firmly put him in the non-friend category. Right now, I can’t afford to do that. The outstanding sum is equal to more than three months’ rent for me.
Nonetheless, considering the mental anguish I’m suffering and, as the Uchino/Holt-Lunstad research has shown, the potential physical health damage, I’d probably be doing my overall well-being a favour by putting this upsetting chapter and «chap» behind me.
On the flip side, the thoughts of just letting it go also anger me. Has it been this frenemy’s plan all along to drive me to a state of disillusionment where I’ll just give up? In that scenario, while many mules might start to submit, I don’t want to admit defeat.
Why bother with friends or enemies when you can have frenemies like these? They get closer to you than anyone.
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