My own worst frenemy
THE Cambridge Dictionary defines a ‘frenemy’ as a person who pretends to be your friend, but is in fact an enemy, and if you were to poll any random group of people, several of them should have stories of experiencing this type of competitive friendship, where there is a fundamental dislike or rivalry between those who are supposed to have each other’s backs.
What has been your experience with a frenemy? Does it compare to any of these stories below?
Thalia, 26:
This lady at work took me under her wing when I just joined the company, and would give me tips on how to improve my performance, how to address the other department heads, how to get my proposals accepted, and even in my personal life, how to get my toddler in one of the more competitive kindergarten programmes. I respected her because it seemed like she wanted to be a mother figure to me, until I started to notice cracks, and other people started dropping hints. Turns out that behind my back she was always criticising my work to the other managers, lambasting me for being a single mother, and was just a rotten person overall for no reason other than that she could. To this day I don’t know what her motive was, because it’s not like I wanted her job or anything. I was just doing my work and looking for a mentor.
Eviann, 28:
I’m now married to the guy that my very good friend warned me about. She said that he had a girlfriend at the time he was approaching me, and even showed me love letters that she had helped him write to the ‘girlfriend’, who she claimed he was planning to propose to. Then to make things worse, he told her that he liked me and she didn’t pass on the message but, instead, kept telling me how in love he was with his girlfriend. So while he was trying to approach me, I kept wondering why this man, who had a girl, wanted to mess with me. It was one night when I stopped to listen to him that we got to comparing notes, and he realised that she hadn’t been passing on the messages to me, and worse, told me he had no girlfriend, and wasn’t planning to propose to anyone. Mind you, my friend was married, so I don’t even know what her end game was, and if it was that she liked the guy and didn’t want me to have him. It took me a while to even believe that what the guy was saying was true, because I couldn’t come up with a reason why my friend would be so against us being together that she would make up a story about a girlfriend and a proposal.
Melissa, 35:
I was getting married and asked my good friend for help as I was just overwhelmed with all the planning. She agreed, and asked to be assigned certain specific tasks – the cake, the décor, and the bridesmaids dresses. I left her to them, but would check in occasionally and she assured me that everything was on point. Mere days before the wedding everything started crumbling as I started to do my final follow-ups. It turns out that she hadn’t ordered the cake, hadn’t met with the bridesmaids to finalise their dress sizes, orders and shipment, and hadn’t done any of the decorations. And, when I tried to call her, she went ghost. I had to figure out everything last minute, including getting the dresses at a department store, driving around to find all the flowers and décor items in the colours I wanted for the church, and literally begging the bakery to put a cake together last minute. She planned to sabotage my wedding, but even though she tried, and even with the stress, I still managed to pull off an amazing ceremony.
