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.
