Surprisingly, blood pressure was also found to rise more in the presence of ambivalent friends than with people the subjects actively disliked....
THINK PAD
A toxic friend may seem oxymoronic: unlike families or colleagues, where we might be obliged to maintain ties, most friendships we opt into. Yet nearly everyone has someone in their social network that they have mixed feelings about.
There’s already strong evidence that positive relationships have protective benefits, and that negative ones can be detrimental, but what about those relationships that are a mix of both? During a study it was found that interactions with these ambivalent friends are associated with increased stress and cardiovascular reactivity. Just the thought of them was enough to elevate heart rate and blood pressure of the participants. Surprisingly, blood pressure was also found to rise more in the presence of ambivalent friends than with people the subjects actively disliked.
We can only maintain a total of 150 friendships, says Dr Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, but we do not invest time or emotional closeness across them equally. In fact, his research has shown that about 60 percent of our total social effort goes to just 15 people, with 40 percent devoted to the five most important.
In setting out to answer why people maintain such ties at all, the study found that they were mostly internal factors. A common justification was they’d already invested a lot in the relationship. For many people, it may go back to school days. There is a cultural tie, too: You have this long, deep history of co-living and sharing experiences together and so a sense of obligation out of respect to that old relationship, even if you have drifted apart.
Many participants saw turning the other cheek at their friend’s rudeness or bad behaviour – a sense of being the bigger person – as the right thing to do. How this reflected on them was also a factor: They didn’t want to be the type of person who couldn’t maintain a friendship.
Often, too, the good times really did outweigh the bad. They would stick around because of these other really good aspects about that person.
A “toxic friendship” typically indicates that a function or expectation of the relationship has been challenged; for example, there has been a betrayal of trust or the investment is imbalanced. But can it be salvaged?
The heart of this is self-reflection: ‘Do I have a sense of what is bothering me here?’ Strong emotions especially indicate that one of our core values (for example, punctuality) has been violated, but we often may not have communicated that clearly to our friends. It may require setting boundaries – for example, avoiding certain topics or activities that you know to be problematic whether you choose to articulate them or not.
Also it’s very easy to recognise somebody else’s behaviour and what they have done that we see as upsetting or wrong, and it is much more difficult, obviously, to look inward. People should see all relationships, including friendships, as a dynamic – our friends are responding to us in some way. We can begin by reflecting on our own selves. ‘What kind of friend am I? Am I supportive, am I reliable?’
