Frenemy: Why the Friend Who Hurts You Sometimes Is Harder to Leave Than One Who Hurts You Always

The Friend Who Hurts You and Loves You Both

Years before I started writing down what two decades in hospice rooms had taught me, I watched a woman’s adult daughter visit her dying mother on a Tuesday afternoon. She sat at the bedside for over an hour. She held her mother’s hand. She told her more than once how brave she was, and she used the word “remarkable.” On her way out, she stopped at the nurses’ station and said, in a tone I had heard before in other hallways, that she gave it another week at most, and that her mother had always been dramatic about pain.

That woman was not an enemy. In the room, she was warm. She was present. She said the right things with what sounded like genuine feeling. The hostility only appeared when the other person could no longer hear it. That gap, between how someone treats you to your face and how they talk about you when you are gone, is closer to what most people mean by the word frenemy than any dictionary definition manages to capture.

The word is a portmanteau of friend and enemy, documented in print as far back as 1891 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and used by gossip columnist Walter Winchell in 1953 to describe the strained relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. It migrated into personal friendships over the following decades, and by the time it reached common use, its meaning had expanded to cover almost any complicated friendship. A friend who pulls back when life gets hard gets labeled a frenemy. So does the person who simply takes more than they give. The pattern that actually keeps people stuck, though, is more specific than either of those. It is someone who gives you enough warmth and enough harm, in rotation, that you can never be sure which version of them is about to show up.

What Ambivalent Friendships Actually Do to You

Most people who have had a frenemy describe the experience as draining without being able to explain exactly why. The research on ambivalent relationships gives a clearer answer than the intuition usually does.

Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her collaborators at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah spent years studying what they called ambivalent friendships, relationships in which the other person is at least somewhat helpful but also at least somewhat upsetting. In a study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, they had more than 100 participants wear blood pressure monitors for three days. Every time a subject had a social interaction lasting more than five minutes, they logged it and rated the quality of that relationship. The finding that got the most attention: blood pressure readings were consistently higher around ambivalent friends than around people the subjects actively disliked.

That result is worth sitting with. Not higher around someone they had a conflict with. Not higher around someone they found difficult. Higher around the friend who was sometimes warm and sometimes not. Holt-Lunstad’s explanation is direct: you expect very little from someone you genuinely dislike, so they cannot disappoint you in the same way. An ambivalent friend keeps raising your hopes and then failing to meet them, and the constant low-grade anticipation of which version of the friendship you are about to encounter keeps the body on alert. The same research found that people with more ambivalent friendships in their networks tended to show higher resting heart rates even in neutral situations, and were more likely to experience depression.

A later study found something that surprised even the researchers. Normally, sharing good news with a friend produces a measurable lift, a kind of reflected warmth that benefits both people. With ambivalent friends, that effect disappeared entirely. People who brought conflicted friends into the lab tended to disengage when discussing even positive experiences, as though they had learned, without quite realizing it, that the good moments were not safe either. The body stops expecting the benefit. It is already bracing.

This is the part most lists of frenemy signs leave out. They treat the problem as one of behavior: what this friend did, what they said, what they implied. The research suggests the problem is also physiological. The pattern is not just unpleasant to be around. Over time, it is wearing in a way that consistent hostility is not.

Why a Frenemy Is Harder to Leave Than Someone Who Is Just Unkind

The question people almost never ask out loud is not whether their friend is a frenemy. By the time someone is sitting with that word, they usually already know. The question underneath is why they cannot seem to leave, or why leaving feels far more complicated than it should. It is a different question than the one you ask about a friendship that has simply stopped being equal. In an unequal friendship, the arithmetic is visible. Here, the arithmetic keeps changing.

A purely hostile person is, in a strange way, easier to manage. The read is consistent. You can calibrate to something predictable. A frenemy gives you something else: a version of the friendship that is genuinely good, sometimes, and that good version is what keeps you coming back to check. The warmth is real enough that walking away feels like abandoning something. The harm is also real. Holding both of those things at the same time is exhausting, which is part of why people take so long to name the pattern clearly.

I sat with people across more than twenty years who spent decades trying to determine which version of a particular relationship was the true one. The honest answer, and the one that usually landed hardest, is that both versions were true. The friendship was genuinely warm at times. It was also genuinely corrosive. Those two things were both accurate, and the cycling between them was not a rough patch. It was the relationship itself.

There is also the psychology of intermittent reinforcement, which is worth naming plainly. When warmth arrives unpredictably rather than consistently, the attachment it produces tends to be stronger than it would be if the warmth were reliable. This is not a character flaw in the person experiencing it. It is how human beings respond to uncertainty. You keep checking because the good version of this person exists and you have seen it. The unpredictability of a frenemy is not incidental to why the relationship is difficult to leave. It is a significant part of the reason.

The social cost of naming the pattern clearly also plays a role. Saying that a friend is two-faced requires you to account for all the times they were not: the birthday they remembered, the night they came through, the version of them that made the friendship worth having. The good parts become evidence against your own read. That tension is part of what the research on what fake friends actually cost over time tends to return to: the damage is not always legible from the inside, especially when the warmth is genuine.

Signs of a Frenemy Most People Keep Explaining Away

The most consistent thing I heard from people who had eventually named a relationship as a frenemy is that the signs were there for years. What was missing was not evidence. It was the willingness to look at the pattern rather than the individual incidents.

These are the signs of a frenemy that tend to appear most reliably, not because any one of them is definitive, but because they cluster:

• They are at their best when you are at your worst. The warmth and support they offer when something goes wrong for you is real and immediate. When something goes well, the response is muted, slightly off, or redirected back to them. Pay attention to which version of this friend shows up in which situations.
• Their compliments tend to contain a small correction. “You looked great tonight, you should dress like that more often.” The surface is positive. The implication is that you usually fall short. This happens often enough that you notice it but rarely call it out, because each individual instance seems minor.
• They share your private information, then apologize for it. The apology may be sincere. The pattern is not. This has happened more than once, and what gets shared is never the neutral detail. It is always something that lands.
• You feel smaller after spending time with them, even when nothing obviously wrong was said. You cannot always identify the moment. You just come away from the interaction with a slightly lower opinion of yourself than you went in with.
• You have started managing what you tell them. You tell yourself it is not a trust issue. But you know which information is safe with them and which is not, and you filter accordingly. That filtering is the relationship asking you something.
• Good news about you tends to produce an unusual response. Not quite celebration. Not quite dismissal. Something in between that leaves you feeling like you should not have brought it up.

The place people most commonly go wrong is treating each incident as a one-off. The backhanded compliment that was probably nothing. The private thing they shared, which they apologized for. The strange flatness when the news was good. Taken individually, every incident has an explanation. The pattern is what the individual incidents are inside of, and the pattern is harder to explain away.

There is also a version of this dynamic that runs entirely below the surface of what gets said. I have known people who could not point to a single specific incident but knew, with a precision they did not know how to justify, that a particular friend left them feeling diminished. That knowledge is data too. The body has been tracking the relationship longer than the mind has been willing to name it.

How to Deal with a Frenemy Once You Have Named the Pattern

Naming the pattern is its own step, and not a small one. What comes after it depends on things only you have access to: how long the history is, what the good parts of the friendship genuinely amount to, how much contact is unavoidable, and what you want to do with the clarity now that you have it.

Some people decide, once they have seen the pattern clearly, that they want to manage the friendship rather than end it. That is a real option, and not necessarily a defeat. Holt-Lunstad’s practical advice here is worth taking seriously: create distance around the situations where the harm tends to concentrate. If certain topics have consistently brought out the two-faced version of this person, keep those topics off the table. If they tend to cancel plans when something better comes along, stop making plans that leave you exposed. Adjust what you bring to them. Do not count on them for categories of support where they have reliably failed you.

This is not the same as pretending the friendship is fine. It is a realistic accounting of what this relationship provides and what it costs, held at the same time. Some people do this well. It requires being honest with yourself about why you are choosing to stay, and making sure that reason is actually yours rather than just inertia or the difficulty of the alternative.

Others reach the point where naming the pattern produces a kind of exhaustion that makes continuation feel impossible. Not because of one incident, but because the accumulated weight of years of smaller incidents, seen clearly all at once, is simply too much. For those people, there are specific things worth knowing about what people have observed about toxic relationships across long experience, before taking any next step.

The clarity itself matters regardless of what you do with it. Knowing what a relationship is, even if you choose to stay in it, changes how you carry it. You stop wondering whether you are reading it wrong. You stop looking for the explanation that would make the pattern finally make sense. The pattern is the explanation. That is not nothing.

Final Thoughts: What the Pattern Was Telling You All Along

One of the things I noticed across two decades in those rooms is that people rarely regret having named a relationship clearly. What they regret, more often, is how long they explained it away, and what that explaining cost them in years of second-guessing their own experience.

The word frenemy has gotten casual in a way the dynamic itself never really is. What it describes is a specific and measurable pattern of warmth and harm cycling in a way that keeps the person on the receiving end perpetually off-balance, always revising their assessment, always finding one more reason not to trust what they feel. The research confirms what most people already know somewhere underneath the explanations: these relationships are harder on us than the ones where someone is simply unkind. The inconsistency is the injury, not just the incidents.

That does not mean this friendship has to end. It means the pattern deserves an honest name. What you do with that honesty is yours to decide. If ending it is the next step you are working toward, the piece on how to end a toxic friendship covers what that actually looks like, including what most people get wrong about the process.

Either way, the pattern was real. You were not misreading it. You were doing what most people do inside a relationship that gives them just enough to keep hoping. Now you have a clearer frame for what you were carrying. What comes next is yours.

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