The Most Draining Person in Your Life Is Probably Someone You Love
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
There is a name that does two things to your body when it lights up your phone.
Not the ex. Not the colleague you privately cannot stand. Those are simple, almost restful, in their way. This name belongs to someone you love. You see it and feel real gladness, and underneath the gladness, arriving in the same half-second, the other thing. You brace.
Maybe you take one breath before answering, or let it ring a beat longer than you need to. Maybe you already know that some part of tonight will go to recovering from a conversation you also wanted to have.
I want to defend that brace. It is one of the most honest things a body does.
For years I sorted people into two bins: good for me, bad for me. The internet loves this sort. We have built an enormous vocabulary for the second bin: toxic, draining, an energy vampire, a red flag with legs. Whole accounts exist to help you spot the villains in your life and remove them, the way you would throw out expired food.
But the sorting kept failing on the same people. The ones I could not file were never villains. They were people I love who also, reliably, cost me something. Most of us have at least one. The parent whose calls you want and manage at the same time. The oldest friend who knows you completely and swings that knowledge in both directions. The sibling whose opinion still runs your evenings, though neither of you ever chose that.
It turns out this category has a name in the research, and the name is not toxic. The psychologists Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino led a team that put portable blood pressure monitors on 102 healthy adults and sent them back into their ordinary lives for three days (Health Psychology, 2003). Five minutes into every social interaction, the cuff took a reading. Afterward, participants wrote down who the person was and rated the relationship itself: how positive, how negative. Not the conversation. The relationship. Plenty of people in a life rate as both at once. Researchers call these ambivalent ties.
The highest systolic readings of people's everyday social lives did not come from the people they plainly disliked. They came from the ambivalent ones. The loved and braced-against.
And there are a lot of them. The same research group asked people to rate everyone important to them on two blunt questions: how helpful is this person when you need support, and how upsetting. Close to half of the important people in an average network scored as both (Health Psychology, 2012). Half. An ordinary social life is roughly made of them.
Why would the mixed people cost more than the disliked ones? An enemy is legible. You expect nothing, guard everything, and go home unsurprised. An ambivalent tie keeps you on duty. Some part of you is always tracking which version of them showed up today, and which version of you the visit will require. The same team tested this in a lab four years after the diary study (Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2007). People brought a friend along and talked with them about events in their lives, good and bad. Those who had brought a mixed friend showed it before the conversations even began: resting heart rate already higher, just sitting there. The authors concluded, with the restraint of scientists, that people "may not be able to fully relax in the presence of ambivalent friends." Even the good visits seem to happen slightly on guard. Which may be why you can spend a lovely afternoon with someone and drive home feeling like you worked a shift.
I have come to think the cut-off conversation is aimed at the easy bin. The purely toxic person is real but rare, and the standard advice mostly works on them, precisely because nothing in you is fighting for the relationship. You do not lie awake missing someone you never loved. The hard case is the mixed one, and about the mixed one the advice goes silent. Your mother is not an energy vampire. Your brother is not a red flag with legs. You are not going to audit half your people out of your life, and you should not, because that half holds most of the ones who would drive through the night for you. The mixture is the relationship. Anyone close enough to matter is close enough to cost.
There is also an arithmetic I cannot get around. If close to half of everyone's important network is ambivalent, then I am in someone's mixed half. So are you, probably for a person you would count among your closest.
Someone loves me and takes a breath before answering my call. If I am honest, I could shortlist the reasons.
Mostly, this levels the field. The brace I feel around certain people, like the brace someone surely feels around me, is what loving a whole, actual person over many years feels like.
What finally changed was small. I retired the internal press release. For a long time I could not say the plain sentence about certain people I love: I love them, and they wear me out. Saying it felt like betrayal, so I ran the campaign instead. Every visit was "so good." The flatness in my voice afterward was just tiredness, the recovery time a coincidence. Denied ambivalence does not disappear; it leaks. It comes out as dread you cannot explain, as the special exhaustion of pretending a hard thing is simple.
Admitted ambivalence turned out to be workable. Once both numbers were allowed to be real, I could deal with the actual relationship instead of the brochure. You can name the one recurring thing instead of indicting the whole person; there is usually one recurring thing. You can change the dose, because some people are wonderful for two hours and corrosive by hour four. (A person who is corrosive by minute one is a different problem, and not this essay's.) A small true thing said out loud, "I go quiet when this comes up," beats the catastrophic false one, "you ruin everything." None of this is estrangement. Call it maintenance, the kind you can only do on something you have stopped lying about.
The brace did not go away. I no longer expect it to. What went away was the second job: the full-time work of denying it.
The name will light up your phone again this week. Both things will arrive in the same half-second, the gladness and the brace. How helpful. How upsetting. For the people I love hardest, I have learned to let both numbers be real, and to stay anyway, on truer terms.
Answer it.