"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer"
Have you ever been successful at this?
I’m agnostic about the existance of enemies.
Good answer.
Yes. Most of them covet what I have or who i'm with. It's easy to spot them soon enough. It's heartbreaking when you find someone in your family acting this way.
Sure. I stayed friends with my angry, jealous Thai married woman supervisors at work who tried to get me fired when I didn't reciprocate their romantic feelings for me. I played stupid, ignored their horrible behavior until the term was up. Besides, since I remained cheerful and didn't react, they stopped attacking me.
Probably. I see things that people do out of spite but I let it go and they usually get over pulling that sort of thing because they find it doesn't affect me much. Had that very issue crop up today. Unfortunately it does mean I don't really trust anyone fully.
I certainly have. People are just jealous by nature. It was frenemies that started nonsense between me and my ex wife and some of them do their best to get me to hate her to this day. People just cannot leave people alone. I absolutely do not like drama. I hate drama. Yet, I deal with and talk about drama every day. Why is there drama? People are jealous and they just cannot leave people alone.
Drama. I hate it. One of the biggest reasons for the demise of my last relationship; she couldn't live without it, and I absolutely refused to get dragged in.
Yhup left him in last year knew him for 6 years lived with him, brought cars with him, made money with him. You end up sussing out a frenemy eventually, glad I did.
Have one now. Fortunately, I will likely never see him again. He's a trumpanzee and went off on me the last time we talked on the phone, called me all kinds of mean things. I'd loaned him a fairly large sum of money a few years back, and to his credit he's paid most of it back, but I am afraid I'm going to have to cut him loose, even though I'm probably one of his only friends. Don't care about the $$$, whether or not I'll ever get the rest of it; I'm just not inclined to put up with any more verbal abuse from the guy.
Hence the reason you were one of his only friends...Some people burn bridges with their anger, but can't or won't do enough self reflection to see they are the problem
I have an aquaintemy. He's a friend of my roommate's, who is an unironic gay neo Nazi, and I'd like to send him on an emergency trip to the dentist's. That being said though, my roommate has been on and on about how few friends he has in this town, so I tolerate this guy hanging out at my place for his sake. I can't wait until my mortgage is up and I no longer need roommates to pay on this place.
Most of my so-called friends would have no trouble throwing me under the bus and you realise that when your ass is against the wall which it has been before and they have.
Yes...funny, I was gonna say 'no', but I lived in a small community with a small-ish clique that everybody went to same parties, same shows, etc. If you didn't like someone that was moderately popular (even if everybody knew they were a douchebag), you couldn't just take them outside for a walk around the block unless they crossed a serious boundary. Or, more specifically, causing drama would just wind up with you being not welcome and incidentally ostracized for causing too much drama. So, you had to play a 'court' game. Louis XIV style.
I've not had someone say, "I hate you, and I'm gonna get you." I dislike being around bad people, in spite of the adage, "Keep your friends close, and frenimies closer." But, my future seems destined for political activism, and politics makes strange bedfellows.
Sun Tzu 孫子 The Art of Warfare "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer" Although this is attributed to various historical figures I am inclined think that it orginated with Sun Tzu. In a nutshell his philosophy is: "Avoid a war if at all possible, if not, bring it to a speedy conclusion with minimum loss of life, damage to land and property."
The whole point of keeping your enemies closer than your friends is simply to learn their strengths and weakness.
I just severed ties with one. It might have been more like an acquaintance than a friend, we didn't have much in common other than bicycle riding. For the last year(?), he would bring out the liberal/conservative difference. He'd say, "Got a picture of your girlfriend (Hillary Clinton) over your bed?", or "Liberals are angry. They're just angry they lost the election", or "I hate liberals!" You can see how I just couldn't take any more. His "teasing" was more tormenting, than friendly banter.
He just sounds like a total idiot - you're definitely better off without him in your life!
I can't take all this political shit just under the surface. By brother, who I get along with, and see eye to eye politically can't even give it a rest. It is not only, his lense through which he not only sees the world, but also frames his conversation and becomes his personality.
There are a ot of people that I don't like, but would rather work with them rather than a friend and there are friends that I would rather like that to try to work with because we probably wouldn't like each other for long lol.
Successful? No. Not really. The wheels fell off it, in very short order. Thankfully, the mutual friend fell out with her too, not long afterwards. The only reason I entertained her in the first place was because she and the mutual friend were joined at the hip, and I didn't want to lose the mutual friend.
I am nice to my ex so I can see my kids anytime I want. I don't hate her and have accepted she is who she is. However, I don't like her and I don't trust her. I don't know if that counts as a frenemy. It does make me a little two faced, which goes against my core principlas. But doing what is best for my kids and seeing them when I want is a higher priority.