And I had to make a choice without either gonna have fewer high quality friends or less quality but more quantity friends.

And this was right at that stage where I also was trying to figure out what kind of friendships that I wanna have on social media.

And it's the same, I think, question that we all have to ask ourselves.

I think of social media friendships like cotton candy.

I call these cotton candy friendships so cotton candy friendships are great.

These are the people that you love seeing at a party on there, and they're really fun to hang out with.

There's a lot, a lot of substance.

There's not a lot of nutrition.

You wouldn't text them if you were going through something hard.

You wouldn't, you know, call them if something happened to them.

But it's a fun, exciting friendship.

The thing is, is you eventually need to have a meal, right?

Like cotton candy is OK every once in a while, but if you have too much of it, your teeth begin toe like rot from it you know, they take from the sugar, um, and give you a sugar headache.

And so I think that it's about what are the friends that give you nutrition and then which of those friends that are kind of the surface ones.

And that was a big decision I had to make.

You've talked about breaking up with friends like So how do you sculpt that garden of friendship?

It's so hard.

So I think that adult friendships is, you know, when you're a teenager, everyone's talking about, like bullying and cyberbullying.

I think, as adults, this adult friendship issue is the next sort of frontier of talking about.

How do we court friends?

How do we build a friendship when it's not romantic?

How do we break up with a friendship when it's been too long?

And the biggest thing that happens with friendships is they do go stale and it's a very weird thing to say, But there are people I'm sure you could think of someone in your life where every time there number pops up on a text messages like it's been a while.

I better call them or, you know, you see them out of convenience or out of location.

And I think those are the kind of friendships that really drain you.

There's actually a study that was done on ambivalent relationships.

Yeah, this is so interesting.

Yeah, I'm thinking about ambivalence a lot.

So toxic people, we get it right.

We all understand that we want to get rid of toxic people.

That's more obvious.

The real danger, I think, is ambivalent relationships.

So these ambivalent relationships are The people were either You don't know how you stand with them, so you don't know if they like you or not.

And they're also the people where you don't know if you really enjoy hanging out with them or not.

Paper had that.

And you're like, Is this gonna be fun?

Was that fun?

Is this fun on by?

Those are the ones that take the more energy.

There are also the more dangerous ones because they tend to creep in and stay in.

So the whole notion of frenemies I find really, really intriguing.

And this is something certainly that I have dealt with in my life.

And it was weird to me how until I read that that it didn't registered.

Why that would be so insidious.

So what?

The study, What the science says.

They did a research study with police officers, and they asked police officers to identify the amount of toxic people in their workplace and the amount of ambivalent people.

And they found that the police officers who had more ambivalent relationships, um, we're sick more often had less happiness at work and didn't like their jobs much then police officers who had toxic people.

Just just think about that for a second.

And the reason for this is because if you have a toxic person, boundaries are easy.

They ask you out to lunch and you're like No thanks, Great.

Like, you know, it's a no thanks.

Where's the fun?

Ambivalent person asked you out to lunch or ask you to their birthday party or you ask you to work on something.

It takes this mental energy where you have this thing where you're like like, will it be good?

Would I rather eat alone at my desk?

Or would I rather have lunch with this person?

And when it's not always easy, that's an incredible drain on our emotional energy.

And if you're an introvert or an amber vert and amber to someone who is kind of splits between extroversion introversion.

Your energy is finite and our mental space is finite.

Some of that I did not realize until much more recently I thought that mental space was sort of endless.

Right.

You could learn forever.

Um, you could think about things forever, but actually, we only have a certain amount of mental time every day.

And if we're dedicating that to trying to figure out if someone likes us or not, which is a very important thing we all like to be liked.

Whether we admit it or not, I think is a waste of mental energy.

Why would we want to spend it towards that?

That's why I think ambivalent people are more dangerous.

Do you have a checklist?

Because I'm thinking back to the people that managed to become frenemies in my own life.

It's kind of scary how long it took me to be able to put that label on them toe sort of wake up to the fact that either they always were, or the relationship that evolved to that like years right years.

I know.

So I don't have a checklist.

It's actually just one simple question.

Sarah.

Are you ever doubting that they're really happy for you?

Wow, that cuts right to the heart of it.

I mean, that's it.

And that that happens.

Actually, quite often, like these people who make these very passive aggressive comments were like, Was that nice?

What does that mean?

If you're ever questioning that, that means they're not truly happy for you.

Or if you have a piece of really good news, they are really true.

Good friend will mirror and match that excitement with you.

Someone who is not as happy for you will come in with dream killer questions.

You know, Dream killers.

Yeah, Dream killer questions are when they question your success, they doubt the success.

I think of all the negatives and dream killers are not always bad.

I have dream killers in my life, and I call them when I need someone to poke holes in a business idea, right?

Like I'll pitch them because they're great practice.

But I know they are not the people that I go to when I have something I'm truly excited about, so that that's the only question you have to ask yourself, and it might be an inconvenient truth.

Like don't answer it off the cuff.

Like, don't answer it really quickly.

Like, try to think of all the times in the last six months that you've seen them and shared something.

Did you feel like they were as happy as you were about your happiness?

I never really Uh huh.

Mhm.

Yeah.

Okay.