In This Article
Spot fake friends with 10 science-backed signs, learn the 3 types of frenemies, and use proven strategies to end toxic friendships gracefully.
Your fake friends are ruining you. That sounds harsh, but research backs it up: ambivalent friendships, the ones where you’re never sure if someone is on your side, raise your blood pressure, increase depression, and may even accelerate biological aging.1
If you want to protect your health and happiness, you need to:
- Spot the frenemies hiding in plain sight
- End ambivalent relationships that drain your energy
- Replace toxic “friends” with genuine connections
Watch our video below to learn more about fake friends and why they are ruining you:
What Is a Fake Friend?
A fake friend is someone whose friendship costs you more than it gives you. Fake friends make you perform a version of yourself that isn’t real: fake liking, fake laughing, or faking interests just to maintain the relationship. If a fake friend discovered who you truly are, they probably wouldn’t stick around.
The biggest difference between a fake friend and a frenemy is awareness. With a frenemy, you know there’s tension. A fake friendship can feel real on the surface while quietly draining your confidence, energy, and self-worth underneath.
What Is a Frenemy?
A frenemy is someone you are friendly with despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry. Frenemies might celebrate your wins to your face, then gossip about you or undermine your accomplishments behind your back.
Frenemies may be more common than you think. Social neuroscientist John Cacioppo explained that humans evolved to prioritize avoiding enemies rather than making friends.2 If you mistake an enemy for a friend, the consequences could be fatal. But if you mistake a potential friend for an enemy, you just miss out on a connection.
So having frenemies is biologically normal. The key is identifying them so you can either repair the friendship or walk away.
3 Types of Fake Friends
Which type sounds familiar?
1. The Jealous Frenemy
This is the most common type. Jealousy often flips friends into enemies, and it goes both ways:
- A colleague is jealous of your promotion, or you’re jealous of theirs
- A friend envies your new relationship, raise, appearance, or social circle
- You catch yourself resenting a friend’s success instead of celebrating it
Why it’s toxic: Jealousy destroys trust, respect, and admiration. Research on “active-constructive responding” shows that genuine friends celebrate your wins with real enthusiasm.3 If good news is met with envy, indifference, or one-upping, the friendship has a jealousy problem.
Action Step: Either address the jealousy directly (“I’ve noticed tension when good things happen for one of us. Can we talk about it?”) or recognize that the friendship has run its course.
2. The Undermining Frenemy (The Manipulator)
With an undermining frenemy, you constantly face dilemmas:
- You landed a new client. Should you share the news, or will they minimize it?
- You lost five pounds. Will they enable bad habits at lunch?
- You want to invite new friends over. Should you include “that” friend who makes passive-aggressive comments?
Undermining frenemies specialize in backhanded compliments (“I love how you just wear anything!”), sarcastic tones, and quietly sabotaging your progress.
Ambivalent relationships are more toxic than purely toxic ones because you never stop second-guessing.
Action Step: Track the pattern. The next three times you share good news with this person, notice their response. If they deflect, minimize, or redirect to themselves every time, that’s not a friend.
3. The Unsure Frenemy
Humans hate not knowing where they stand with someone.
- “I think he considers me a close friend… but is he close friends with everyone?”
- “Are we actual friends or just work friends?”
- “She knows me, but I’m not sure if we’re acquaintances or real contacts.”
Why it’s toxic: This kind of ambivalence takes enormous energy. You’re in a constant state of guessing, and research links chronic uncertainty to elevated stress responses.4
Action Step: Have a clarity conversation. Something like: “I really value our friendship and want to make sure we’re on the same page. How do you feel about where we stand?” Directness resolves ambiguity faster than months of wondering.
10 Signs of a Fake Friend
Fake friends don’t usually appear overnight. The warning signs build slowly. Here’s how to spot them:
1. Your interests have become more and more different.
Board game friends? Not anymore. Gym buddies? The most exercise your friend gets now is lifting the remote.
2. You no longer work together, play on the same sports team, or attend the same organization.
What happens when you are no longer obligated to be around your “friends” anymore? If you try to make plans and they ignore you, or worse, you get the “Sure, maybe next week?” text, that’s a sign to move on.
3. Over time, you grew apart.
Real friends stick around through the boring and difficult parts of life, not just the fun parts.
4. You are always walking on eggshells.
Sometimes there are people who make you overthink everything you say. Research links chronic uncertainty in relationships to elevated stress and even changes in brain function.4 If you find yourself constantly predicting a friend’s reaction, you might be in a toxic friendship.
5. You are less alike than you originally thought.
You both work at the same place, have a cat, and love sushi. But sometimes the commonalities end there.
6. You have become different people than when you were younger.
Think back 7 to 10 years. You’ve likely changed dramatically. Being different often requires a different circle of friends, and that’s not a failure. It’s growth.
7. You have nothing in common anymore.
When the only thing holding a friendship together is history, it’s worth asking whether history alone is enough fuel.
8. You only hear from them when they need something.
The opportunist friend: you hear from them once or twice a year asking for a favor. A major study found that only about half of friendships are actually mutual, meaning about 50% of the time, when you consider someone a friend, they don’t feel the same way.5
9. “Jokes” are no longer funny anymore.
Here’s the test: if your friend tells a joke to make you feel happy, that’s friendship. If your “friend” tells a joke for the room’s laughter, regardless of how it makes you feel, that’s frenemy territory.
10. It’s just too emotional.
A relationship with extreme highs and extreme lows usually won’t last. That emotional rollercoaster is a hallmark of an ambivalent relationship.
Where fake friends commonly appear: childhood friends, colleagues from previous jobs, college buddies, exes, trip or travel acquaintances, former neighbors, or someone who made a great first impression but turned out to be less than stellar.
Here’s the big idea: You can grow out of friends, just like you grow out of clothes. And this is not a bad thing.
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Only about half of friendships are actually mutual—meaning 50% of the time, someone you consider a friend doesn’t feel the same way.
The Real Toll: How Fake Friends Damage Your Health
This isn’t just about hurt feelings. The science on toxic and ambivalent friendships is striking.
Researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad found that people interacting with ambivalent friends had significantly higher blood pressure, even during non-stressful interactions.1 UCLA researcher Naomi Eisenberger’s landmark 2003 study showed that social exclusion activates the same brain regions as physical pain.6
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of human life at 85+ years, found that the quality of your relationships at age fifty is the single best predictor of your health at age eighty. Not cholesterol. Not exercise. Relationships. And high-conflict relationships were worse for health than being alone.7
Psychologist Bert Uchino found that the more ambivalent relationships you have, the more likely you are to experience higher rates of depression, stress, and dissatisfaction.8 Researcher Michelle Duffy studied this among police officers and found something surprising: officers who had coworkers who were sometimes supportive and sometimes undermining missed even more work and felt even less committed than those with purely toxic colleagues.9 When you have a purely toxic relationship, you can work to keep clear of it. But ambivalent relationships force constant second-guessing, vigilance, and emotional labor.
Duffy’s findings underscore what we teach in People School: understanding the dynamics of your relationships is one of the most important people skills you can develop.
The quality of your relationships at age fifty is the single best predictor of your health at age eighty.
Why You Stay: The Psychology of Guilt and Loyalty
If fake friends are so damaging, why is it so hard to leave? Three psychological forces keep people trapped.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: If you’ve been friends for ten or twenty years, your brain treats leaving as “wasting” that investment, even if the current relationship is draining you. Having history with someone is not enough fuel for a friendship.
Intermittent Reinforcement: Toxic friendships are rarely bad 100% of the time. When a friend occasionally acts kindly or reminds you of “the old days,” it creates a powerful psychological hook. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive: unpredictable rewards are more compelling than consistent ones.
Guilt as a Trap: Many people believe a “good friend” is endlessly patient and loyal. Ending a friendship, even a harmful one, triggers the thought: “I’m being a bad person.” Toxic friends often exploit this by guilt-tripping, making you feel responsible for their happiness.
Here’s what happens when you stay on the guilt wave: your interactions become less fun, getting together feels like an obligation, you dread spending time with them, and you agonize over invites, calls, and get-togethers.
The hard truth: When you begrudge a friendship, they feel it. When guilt is the driving force, the relationship is doomed. You are not serving anyone by maintaining the ruse.
How to Spot a Real Friend (The Contrast Test)
A mega-study by Michigan State University surveyed nearly 280,000 people across almost 100 countries. The result: there was a direct correlation between friendship quality and overall health and happiness.10
Signs of a genuine friendship:
- They support you when you’re down, not just when it’s convenient
- They keep their promises and are consistent
- They accept your flaws without weaponizing them
- They actively listen rather than steering every conversation back to themselves
- They make you want to become better
The Three-Question Litmus Test:
- Do you have to “perform” or filter yourself around them?
- Are they happy for you when you have good news that has nothing to do with them?
- Would they still be here if you had nothing to offer them?
How Friendships Turn Fake: The Spheres of Interest Model
Fake friends don’t usually start fake. When you first meet someone, you’re not sure how much your interests overlap.
As you get to know each other, you find commonalities. The areas you share are called relevance.
In a great relationship, the circles move closer together:
Before a relationship becomes obligatory and then fake, there is usually no movement at all, or your common interests begin to diverge. With most obligatory friends, your spheres of interest slowly move away from each other.
Obligatory Friend: Someone you don’t enjoy spending time with, but end up spending time with because you feel guilty. Over time, obligatory friends end up becoming fake friends.
How to End a Friendship
There’s no established protocol for friendship breakups. But sometimes they’re necessary. Here are four approaches.
Option 1: The Direct Conversation
Bring everything to the surface: hidden resentments, miscommunications, old fights, and misunderstandings.
Use “I” statements instead of accusations:
“I’ve been reflecting on our friendship, and I feel we’re moving in different directions. I value the time we’ve spent together, but I don’t think we’re a good match for the kind of support we both need right now.”
Pro Tip: Do this in person, not over text. Know your ideal outcome before the conversation starts.
Option 2: The Break
Friendships sometimes need breaks. They give you fresh perspective, time to calm down, and room to re-evaluate.
Pro Tip: Add a time component. “Let’s check in again in two weeks” prevents the break from becoming an indefinite ghost.
Option 3: The Gradual Fade
Research on friendship dissolution shows the gradual fade is the most common and least hurtful approach. Use this if the friendship is more casual than close, or if they’re bad with boundaries. Text instead of call, take longer to respond, and get together in less intimate, shorter settings.
Option 4: The Clean Break
Sometimes the friendship bubble needs bursting. A clean break treats the friendship breakup with the same honesty as a romantic one:
“Hey, I know we’ve had trouble getting together. I think that’s mostly on me. When [specific event] happened, it really hurt my feelings, and I haven’t been able to get over it. I know you’re a great person, but I think our relationship has changed. I’m sorry.”
Key principles: State needs that aren’t being met. Be gentle and kind. Talk about how you feel, not what they did wrong. Honor the history.
When you say no to relationships that don’t serve you, you make room for relationships that do.
How to Move On and Build Genuine Friendships
Research by Dr. Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found that genuine friendship requires real time investment11
- 40-60 hours to go from acquaintance to casual friend
- 80-100 hours to become a real friend
- 200+ hours to become close friends
Practical Steps for Rebuilding
- Invest in “warm” acquaintances. You likely already know people you enjoy but haven’t deepened the connection with. If you need a starting point, check out our guide on how to make friends.
- Prioritize shared activities over “catching up.” Doing things together builds bonds faster than sitting across a table recapping your week. Try some games with friends to break the ice.
- Watch for reciprocation early. If someone consistently doesn’t match your effort in the first few months, they’re unlikely to start later.
- Remember Dunbar’s Number. Most people only have about 5 people in their inner support circle.12 You don’t need a huge social network. You need a small number of genuine connections.
Action Step: Identify two or three “warm” acquaintances this week. Invite one of them to do something specific (not “we should hang out sometime” but “want to try that new restaurant Thursday?”).
You don’t need a huge social circle. You need a small number of genuine connections.
Being Alone vs. Having Fake Friends
“Is it better to have no friends or fake friends?”
The science is clear: being alone is better than being in toxic company. A study led by Ashley Barr at the University of Buffalo found that people in low-quality relationships had more depressive symptoms and poorer general health than people who were single.13 The Harvard Study confirmed that high-conflict relationships were worse for health than being alone.7
The key distinction is between loneliness (distressing isolation you didn’t choose) and solitude (chosen alone time that allows for recovery). Cutting fake friends may feel lonely at first, but solitude is a stepping stone, not a destination.
Watch this interview with Tom Bilyeu, where fake friends, ambivalent relationships, and more are discussed:
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I identify fake friends in my life?
Use three tests. The Reciprocity Test: are you initiating 90% or more of the contact? The Celebration Test: when you share good news, do they respond with genuine enthusiasm or envy and indifference? The Energy Test: after spending time with them, do you feel recharged or drained? If the answers point to one-sidedness, fake enthusiasm, and exhaustion, you’re likely dealing with a fake friend.
Is it better to have no friends or fake friends?
Research consistently shows that being alone is healthier than being in toxic company. A University of Buffalo study found that people in low-quality relationships had more depressive symptoms than people who were single. Solitude gives you space to recover and rebuild, while fake friendships actively damage your health.
How do I break up with a fake friend?
Match the approach to the closeness of the friendship. For close, long-term friends, have a direct conversation using “I” statements. For casual friends you’ve drifted from, a gradual fade works well. For toxic or boundary-violating friends, a clean break with clear language is often necessary. In all cases, honor the history, avoid blame, and don’t badmouth them to mutual friends.
Why do people become fake friends?
Most people aren’t fake because they’re malicious. Fake friendship often stems from insecurity, learned survival patterns, or difficulty with emotional honesty. Understanding the why doesn’t mean you have to tolerate the behavior, but it can help you leave without bitterness.
How do I stop feeling guilty about ending a friendship?
Guilt about ending friendships usually comes from the sunk cost fallacy and internalized beliefs about being a “good friend.” Remind yourself: guilt is not fuel for a friendship. Maintaining a relationship out of obligation hurts both people.
How long does it take to get over a friendship breakup?
Recovering from a significant friendship loss typically takes six months to two years. Psychologists call this “disenfranchised grief” because society doesn’t openly acknowledge friendship loss the way it does romantic breakups. The grief is real, and giving yourself permission to feel it is the first step toward healing.
Fake Friends Takeaway
Here are the most important action steps:
- Run the Three-Question Litmus Test on your five closest friendships: Do you perform around them? Are they happy for your wins? Would they be here if you had nothing to offer?
- Identify your ambivalent relationships using the self-assessment above. These are more damaging than purely toxic ones.
- Choose your exit strategy based on the closeness of the friendship: direct conversation, break, gradual fade, or clean break.
- Invest your freed-up social energy in 2-3 “warm” acquaintances you already like but haven’t deepened.
- Remember the 200-hour rule. Genuine friendships take real time, so start investing in the right people now.
Guilt is not fuel. History is not enough. Feigned closeness is deception. Be honest, make room for real relationships, and live in truth with real friends.
If you are struggling, please note that this content is not professional medical advice. Consult a doctor or licensed therapist for questions about your physical or mental health.
