Frenemies and Facebook

I know, I know, it's been awhile. But in my defense--I warned you this was coming! There are only so many hours in the day and I can only be expected to be alert and productive during a small percentage of those hours... specifically the ones during which I am paid a salary to perform job related tasks. The remaining hours have recently been a flurry of used cars, human resource forms, insurance policies, and The Office: Season 2. You understand.

Fortunately, I've been moderately productive in the last couple weeks. Car? Check. Financing? Check. Trip to Portland, Maine to visit long lost college friends and new baby? Check. And how lovely it all was! Have you been to Portland? It's really very nice and small and filled with lobster. I bought a tiny stuffed lobster that makes strange lobstery noises to put on my Christmas tree. Check!

On the drive back home, we listened to a recent episode of "This American Life" called Frenemies. That is, people who are your friends-slash-enemies. (Note: The word "frenemy" is incredibly annoying to me, as I'm sure it is to you. I would never, ever utter "frenemy" to genuinely describe one of my relationships. However, for the sake of this discussion, I'm going to use "frenemy" as un-sarcastically as I can, and I'm even going to take the quotes off. Frenemy. See? That's better.)

This episode shocked me. I was expecting a segment on adolescent girls and an analysis of "The Hills" with maybe a little "Bromance" tied in somehow. But in true TAL fashion, none of those things occurred. I don't want to ruin the episode if you haven't heard it, but there is some serious heavy lifting. Heavy brain lifting.

One particularly interesting bit was a brief interview with researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad who is something of a frenemy expert (and has been featured on Oprah). Holt-Lunstad found that interactions with people we have both positive and negative feelings for can cause substantial increases in our blood pressure. The weird thing is that this jump in blood pressure only occurred when people interacted with the frenemy types; interactions with people they openly felt negative about had little to no effect on blood pressure.

Moreover, Holt-Lunstad estimates that half of our relationships could be characterized as the frenemy variety. Fifty percent?! As Ira explains, these are people that "we care a lot about, we feel positive towards. But we also have real conflicts and negative feelings about as well." This includes friends who are very competitive, unreliable, inconsiderate, etc.

Right now, maybe you are thinking one of two things:

1. Shut up, that is not the Urban Dictionary definition of frenemy.
2. OMG! Are all my friends really my frenemies? Do I have any friends AT ALL?!

If you had Thought #1, shut up yourself. For the sake of this discussion, I'm not using "The Hills" definition of frenemy, but rather a broader, more inclusive way of describing difficult relationships... be it the relationship with your mom, your boyfriend or your BFFAEAEAE. (Best Friend Forever And Ever And Ever, etc.)

I had Thought #2. For many minutes after hearing Ira drop the Half Of The People You Know Raise Your Blood Pressure Bomb, I wondered if only 50% of the people I knew could be considered frenemies. I have conflicts and negative feelings about events and people fairly often. Is my percentage of frenemies more like 75%? 90%? 100%?! Aaahhhhhhhh

At this point, a very wise friend chimed in from the back seat. "Duh, Chloe," she said, rolling her eyes dramatically in the rear view mirror. "Obviously you can have small spats and disagreements with your friends and family, but that doesn't mean your relationships are inherently flawed. Gaw-d." She then mumbled something about Wellesley College and smacked her gum whorishly. (JK!)

My Wellesley friend is right, albeit dramatic. It is impossible to feel completely positive about a fellow human being ALL the time. Let's be real here. Yes, you love your family, your siblings, your BFF's and the like, but let's face it--you question their decisions sometimes. Their choice of clothing, their opinion on diet soda, their inability to resist sleeping with their ex-boyfriends. Sometimes the things they do are extremely annoying and cause us to have anxiety, but only occasionally. Its the people in our lives (maybe even the same family, siblings and BFF's) whose actions annoy us on a consistent and regular basis that we can categorize as part of "The 50 Percent."

I considered sitting down and taking inventory of my social and familial circles to find out who is in my personal "50 Percent." But then I thought, why? It will inevitably end in a big emo mess, and I'm sure my blood pressure will skyrocket just thinking about all the reasons people could potentially be in "The 50 Percent." Bad idea.

But oddly enough, after watching this video from the author of Friend or Frenemy?: A Guide to the Friends You Need and the Ones You Don't, I feel like a freak for having a "50 Percent" at all.

Note: Sorry that the picture is a decoy. The video is un-embeddable for some reason. Stupid Amazon! Click here to watch it.

"I wouldn't allow it," says one woman when asked if she's ever experienced a frenemy. Granted, I think this Andrea Lavinthal person has a stricter definition of frenemy than I've been using in this post, which is why most of the women are appalled at the idea of having a frenemy. Also, these are women on the streets of New York City being interviewed by an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, so obviously this is a far cry from any sort of honest discussion about difficult relationships.

Still, the reason I included this weird video in this post is Lavinthal's question about Facebook (and presumably other social networking sites), which got me thinking. How does Facebook factor into the frenemy/"50 Percent" discussion?

Here's my theory: Pre-Facebook (before 2004) there wasn't really a good way to stay in touch with the hundreds of acquaintances you accumulated through life. People typically lost track of their high school sophomore Spanish classmates or their middle school basketball teammates, unless they were the center of a juicy piece of gossip or you ran into their mom at the grocery store. On the one hand, it was tragic to lose touch with people you liked and cared about, albeit inactively. On the other hand, that's life! Yes, people lost track of peripheral friends, but they also lost track of the marginal friends, the frenemies and the regular enemies. Yay!

But now in the post-2004 Facebook world, all those peripheral/marginal/quasi/frenemy type friends are now a part of your daily life. One would presume that graduating from both high school and college and moving across the continent would eliminate a sizable chunk out of "The 50 Percent". But thanks to Facebook, "The 50 Percent" can follow you wherever you go.

From personal experience, an annoying status update by a frenemy sort of person is enough to make my blood boil a bit. A cynical, anti-Facebook person would probably sneer at me right now and say, "Then quit already if you hate it so much." I suppose thats an option, but it misses my point.

Basically, there are 3 questions I'd like to ask:

1. Does Facebook make it easier or harder to maintain "The 50 Percent"?
   
2. Are passive online interactions (like reading a status update or browsing a photo album) enough to elicit the same physiological responses that Holt-Lunstad found in face-to-face interactions? (i.e. a hike in blood pressure)
   
3. Does it even matter?! Is having a "50 Percent" an inevitable and unavoidable part of life?

Tell me what you think, and I'll be following up with some research one day.