How to Know Your Frenemy
[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …
