Are your difficult friends aging you?
According to new research, YES! They absolutely are! (Currently hoping I can claw some stolen youth back, now I've ditched them all.)
I knew it, deep down - we all did - but now: there’s hard stats to prove it. According to research published days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the more difficult people you have in your network, the faster you’ll age. The pace of that aging increases by 1.5% for each difficult person - or nine friggin months of biological age. It’s because they function as “chronic stressors” on our systems; and stress is a major enemy of longevity. (I just Googled why stress ages us. Apparently it’s because we have these protective caps on the ends of our chromosomes called Telomeres. Their length is directly related to how our cells age - and stress accelerates their shortening, something which causes premature wrinkles and health issues. Also, stress can disrupt sleep, and sleep is another major predictor of how we age.)
This study defines difficult friends as “hasslers”, people “who create problems or make life more difficult,” and historically, I’ve had a major issue with them. They have been drawn to me like moths to a flame, and, oh! How I indulged them! Like the fool/ older sister/ emotional martyr I was - before therapy.
My first session with my brilliant therapist, she said: “Polly, you need to start distinguishing between the good guys in your life, and the bad guys.” It took me five years of work with her to get there, but I did. I re-realised how effectively I’ve dumped them all just recently (though before this aging research came out). I was out with a (good non-Hassler) friend. “What ever happened to Hassler #1?” she asked. “She stopped speaking to me in 2018 because I ‘didn’t give her enough notice I was going on holiday’”, I said.
“And Hassler #7?” she asked.
“Oh, so: every time she messages me to ask to meet, I say: ‘Great! You ok to book?’, and she instantly disappears. Because, you know, I do the menial sh*t, not her. Oh, and Hassler #3 is still mad because I changed Botox providers ‘behind her back’, I’m supposed to keep her ‘in the loop’ on all those things apparently, and Hassler #9 is nervous because I won’t let her forget the favour she offered to do me in 2022, but then - didn’t do, obviously; reciprocal favours are not her style.”
“Good work, PV!” my mate said, like I’m a recovering addict. Which I possibly am. Recovering Hassler Addict.
Now, had my therapist told me Hasslers were actively aging to me, to us all, f**king with our skin and inflammation and so forth, as surely as the sun, or fags, or no sleep, or free radicals - I might well have ditched their hassly arses quicker. My faintly martyrish tendencies don’t stand a hope in hell when pitched against my vanity. But this was some years ago, the research didn’t yet exist.
Anyway, I kinda enjoy the process of overriding all those Hassler Indulging instincts. Spotting them through their myriad guises, seeing their tactics so ridiculously clearly where once I’d only have seen Person In Need (how dare you deny them?), then deploying one of my newly accrued tactics for dispensing with them. I’m coming to those.
I take genuine pleasure in it. It’s an excuse to Mean Girl them (because sometimes, you have to meet other women, and some men, with that. You just do).
I offered to give an Irish mate a crash course in it, the day before yesterday. Actually, I offered to give her a crash course in being more selfish generally, because she’s absolutely useless at it, and it’s waring her so thin. I specify that she’s Irish, because I’ve noticed a lot of my Irish mates struggle with being selfish.
“Sorry if that’s racist,” I told her.
“It’s absolutely not,” she said. “It’s true.”
(“It’s like the Irish condition,” Graham Norton told me, when I interviewed him years ago.)
I told her about another Irish mate who suffers similarly. She’s married to an English bloke, who does not suffer from it at all. He therefore has no issue just not showing up for dinner parties, drinks, whatever, if he doesn’t feel like it - while she wouldn’t dream of not showing up to everything. She is so mortified by his unexplained No Shows, she has started telling people he is “out, clubbing. Now they all think he’s really cool. Which is irritating.”
“JUST TELL THEM HE’S AN ANTI SOCIAL BASTARD AND HE’S AT HOME ON THE SOFA!” I say. This is what I do, regarding Mr Polly’s persistent long term absences from things we’ve been invited to.
“I CAN’T! WHAT WILL THEY THINK?”
“WHO CARES?” I say.
Anyway. Irish friend One had messaged me to tell me she was coming to London for the day, and to ask which area I thought would be best for her specific shopping requirements. “Hmmmm… Kings Road, I reckon,” I’d said. “It’s up itself but you’ll get the best selection for this particular endeavour.”
“Ah, OK,” she said. “I think I have to go to see family in South London though, so I won’t have time to get there because it’s too far and changey on the tube.”
“Don’t see the family?” I suggest. “You’re only here for a day.”
“Ah, I’d feel bad,” she says.
“Didn't you see them two weeks ago when you were over?”
“Yeah, but I can’t come to London and not see them.”
”YOU BLOODY CAN!” I say.
“They’ll know!” she says.
“They won’t! Don’t tell them, and don’t Instagram.”
“WHAT IF I BUMP INTO THEM?”
“It’s a very big city, and anyway, if you’re west on the King’s Road, and they’re south - you won’t. And they might not mind anyway. They shouldn’t.”
“Hmmmm,” she says.
“You need to be more selfish.”
“Hmmmmmm.”
“You really do. And? You can definitely be selfish when you’re in London. It’s a selfish city. See it as a mini break from your Irishness.”
Later, she sends me a booking appointment for a piercing place in Chelsea. “YES!” I say.
“You need to give Irish women lessons in how to be more selfish,” she says.
Actually, I think a lot of women in general (and to be fair, some men) could do with lessons in how to be more selfish. It’s your first defence against the Hasslers, for a start. Which makes it a really effective anti aging protocol.
And anyway: there is truly nothing wrong with, on occasions, valuing your time, your energy, your everything, over and above that thing someone else wants you to do. Even if the someone else isn’t a Hassler.
OK. OK, I know some people are really selfish anyway. I know being too selfish is definitely A Thing…
The trick is, how to be EXACTLY the right amount of selfish! The reasonable amount of selfish, the amount of selfish which serves you, without turning you into a complete arsehole. Which stops you aging prematurely, but doesn’t make the planet worse because, here’s another one only capable of thinking of themselves. You know: a classy, cool amount of selfish.
Basically: you need to work out who deserves you, and who doesn’t. This, to be fair, might be the secret to all decent relationships.
Having determined that - you can be selfish with the ones who don’t deserve you, and endlessly giving with the ones who do, AKA - exactly the right amount of selfish. The ones in the middle? You can deal with them on a case-by-case, instance-by-instance basis.
But how to know?
First, there’s a good drinking test for them. If you go for a night out with them: how do you feel, the next day? Hangovers make us - not rational, certainly, but - usefully raw. If, even through the grogginess and the nausea and the head, you’re feeling fundamentally jolly… That’s a good one! A non Hassler. If you’re feeling edgy and vulnerable and confused, like you might have overshared something they could use against you while disinhibited with wine; or a bit grubby, or exhausted beyond the booze-disrupted sleep because you spent the whole night indulging them, talking about them, reassuring them, mopping up their tears and so forth… Hmmm. Maybe not good. It’s not definitive. You’ll perhaps need to repeat a couple of times, see if it’s a pattern.
But, even if you’re sober, you can ask yourself: how do you feel when they ask you for something? To go out of your way, even slightly, to do something, or be somewhere, or give up some information? (It was a real shock to me, to realise I didn't have to give up my knowledge the moment anyone asked me for it, by the way. “That stuff isn’t free,” my shrink told me. “It doesn’t come at no cost to you.”)
Some people ask you for stuff and it’s an act of grace. Some people ask you for stuff and it feels like a massive intrusion. That’s because you’re picking up on their agenda and intention, it’s because enmeshed in the asking, is the expression of how they see you.
There will be people who
