friendenemy

When a new book on friendship came on the scene, I was eager to see where it fit on my already bulging friendship bookshelf. The just-released Friend or Frenemy: A Guide to the Friends You Need and the Ones You Don’t (Harper, 2008) by Andrea Lavinthal & Jessica Rozler is a quick summer read aimed at teens and young women who can probably breeze through the fast-moving pages within an hour---even while texting.

The chapters read like a series of Cosmo Girl magazine articles with lots of headers, little quizzes, and charts liberally interspersed between text. The book is an unambiguously humorous, rather than serious, take on friendship that makes abundant use of whimsy and has oodles of contemporary cultural references.

If you have no frenemies and you feel well-befriended, you will laugh out loud at the author’s portrayals of “users, losers and abusers” and “odd couples.” My favorite pages (perhaps because I tend to be deadly serious): the timeline of "Tragedies in Girlfriend History" and the chapter called "Misery Loves Company," on making new friends.

If you are heartbroken about losing a friend or feeling alone, this book isn’t the antidote for you---in fact, you may read it without a giggle and plummet into the depths of despair. I’d characterize this book as “Friendship Lite”---a fun read for someone under 25 whose friendships are largely intact.

I found a new-to-me friendship term in the Urban Dictionary, frienvy. It describes the envious feelings someone has towards a friend who loses weight, gets a promotion, or finds a new love. OK, it’s kind of cute.

The dictionary also defines friendwhoring, the verb: stealing someone else’s friends and making them your own. Getting a bit more nasty.

Another questionable term that has entered the rapidly growing friendship lexicon (although no one is quite sure how to spell it) is friendenemy, frenemy, or frienemy. It describes friends whom you feel ambivalent about, or friends who feel ambivalent about you. In both cases, two people are friends by all outward appearances but they really can’t stand each other.

The social networking site MyFrienemies.com seizes on this perversion of friendship and takes it to a new height. The site facilitates connections among people who share frienenemies. “Rather than dwelling on the negative, we invite you to foster new friendship based on shared dislikes, annoyances, and disappointments,” boasts the home page.

Their categories of frienemies are somewhat illuminating. These include: cheaters, complainers, depressives, drunks, hostile-aggressives, indecisives, know-it-all-experts, lazys, liars, negativists, one uppers, paranoids, pathological liars, psychos, scenesters, silent and unresponsives, soul suckers, super-agreeables, total bores, and users.

But the stigmatizing language on the site (e.g. psychos and drunks) positively rattles me. As does trivializing the notion of an imperfect friendship, which turns out to be a very common but painful experience.

Yes, ambivalent relationships exist and you need to get over them, but I’m not sure this type of social networking is the best route.