 If you have to make only one new year resolution, make it this, get rid of a fake friend. I just did. I will not pretend that it has been easy. I'm mourning, of course, I'm sad, but I also feel so healed. Getting rid, discarding this fake friend, it was like exercising some dark entity, a pregnant cloud dissipated. Why? How come? Here's why. Fake friends are not your friends. They're your enemies. They're enablers. They enable your dark side, your self-destructiveness, your self-harm. They're envious of you. They are your haters. They hate on you. Fake friends are always parasitic. They are inferior to you in some way or many ways. They are less intelligent than you are, less endowed, less skilled, less good-looking, less well-connected, less something. And disinferiority drives them to the point of madness, disintegration, disregulation. As they fake empathy, as they feign love for you, they constantly conspire. They constantly work against you behind your back because they fantasize about being you. But always keep falling short. They are pale wannabe imitations of you. Their lives are in disarray. The personality is short. They are opportunistic, selfish predators on the prowl. You don't see fake friends coming. They are covert. They are snakes in the grass. They have no moral compass. They have no loyalty. They don't have even a rudimentary grasp of morality. They are feral, savage, antisocial, psychopathic and narcissistic. And yes, often masquerading as empathic saints, which they never are. Fake friends are the worst thing that can happen to you. And the best thing you can do for yourself this coming new year is to rid yourself of their presence. But Sam, you would ask, how can I tell a fake friend from a true one? A true friend will never take advantage of your moment of weakness or your vulnerability. A true friend will contact you to ask if everything is okay and whether he can be of help when he witnesses a moment of distress or your total meltdown. A fake friend will pounce on your every misstep. A fake friend will capitalize on every mistake. A fake friend will steal what is yours, your property, your ideas. He will poach your loved ones. A fake friend will leverage your lapses and relapses. He will rejoice in your downfall or hurt. That's what a fake friend does for you. A true friend roots for you. A true friend takes pride in your accomplishments, but a fake friend will set you up for failure, give you bad advice, collude with your self-destructive behaviors, introduce you to the wrong people, bend mouth you to others in order to aggrandize himself, for example, as a savior. A fake friend will envy you virulently, ceaselessly. A true friend supports you only when he believes that you are doing the right thing in your own self-interest and welfare. A fake friend supports you always, no matter what you do. A true friend respects you only when you have earned respect and when you've acted respectively. A fake friend respects you, quote-unquote, regardless of your behavior or misbehavior. A true friend trusts you only as long as you prove yourself trustworthy, only while you do not put his trust to the test too often and only on certain issues. A fake friend trusts you with everything and always, at least verbally. A true friend puts to you a mirror in which you see reality and the truth. He calibrates you. He prevents you from mishaps and missteps, even when you do misbehave, even when you give your friend permission to do something he wouldn't, because he knows it would hurt you. A true friend is there for you. A fake friend puts to you a mirror in which you see your own reflection, yourself and nothing else besides, because the fake friend is an apparition, a hollow void and nothingness, rafied in absence. A true friend loves you in this friendship. He loves you even without your friendship. He always provides you with what you need, closure, for example, good advice, a shoulder to cry on. A fake friend loves himself in your so-called friendship, or he loves the friendship itself because it brings him benefits, but he never loves you. He doesn't care about your emotional needs or your well-being. With a true friend, you need never ask what is he getting out of this relationship, because loving you is its own reward. With a fake friend, you must always ask, why is he still in this relationship? What's in it for him? Because loving you is never enough of a reward, and a fake friend isn't capable of love, and so incapable of loving you. He is dead inside. One example of fake friends are enablers. Enablers are often mistaken for friends when in reality they're your worst enemies. Enablers encourage your self-destructive behaviors. Enablers aid and abit your suffering. Enablers amplify your self-harm. A true friend would never hand you a loaded gun knowing that you may be suicidal, and enabler would do it with a smile gleefully. An enabler would have sex with your girlfriend at your request, aware that this will cause you excruciating pain. An enabler would pity you, at least overtly, but would continue to ply you with alcohol if your alcoholic would continue to supply you with drugs if you're a junkie. An enabler would encourage a shopaholic to shop, a walkaholic to work. An enabler would go on retail therapy sprees with a shopaholic. An enabler would induct you into bed in juries company knowing full well what is going to happen. Beware the enabler. Charming, smiling, solicitous, there's snakes in your grass. Fake friends are the worst thing that can happen to you. A marriage among men, among women. The fakery of friendship shatters your trust, destroys your perception of the world as a just and beautiful world. A fake friend regresses you, infantilizes you. A fake friend hurts you to the quick. And he does this with the worst intentions in mind. It's an enemy. Treat him as such. Finally, the last type of fake friends. The weak people pleases. I must confess that weak people terrify me. Weakness of character is indistinguishable from evil. Fake friends are evil. The weak are suggestible, malleable, mutable. And therefore, the weak are highly unstable. They're unreliable. They're not trustworthy. People pleasing and an inability to say no even to the most degrading offers to the most immoral propositions and demands. Such inability leads the weak to reckless, disgraceful, anti-social acts and to betrayal. It leads them to betrayal. Weak people are enablers in the worst sense of the word. They aid and abet the self-destructiveness of others. And gradually, to survive their own racking guilt, their shame, their self-loathing, they evolve. They develop into narcissists and psychopaths. They mistake defiance for boundary assertiveness because weak people have no boundaries. Weak people betray their loved ones and their friends. They breach their own fragile and permeable boundaries time and again just in order to fit in. In order to be liked. In order to be considered a savior. In order to buttress their own grandiose infimage as a good person. In order to counter loneliness and boredom. But weak people, people-pleasers are not good people. They're bad people. They're evil people. They're fake. Many weak people are mentally ill. They suffer from, I don't know, borderline dependent personality disorder. But others have been conditioned by needy and selfish parents or absent parents to become subservient and self-deny. Rescuer, savior, fixer types are attracted to weak mates. They crave the omnipotence that comes with the territory but also the drama, ups and downs, pain, sweet reconciliations of the tumultuous fights, intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonding. If you have a weak people-pleaser as a fake friend, he would not say no if your wife were to propose to him. He would not say no if someone were to ask him to collaborate in your betrayal. He would not say no to anyone who seeks to destroy you and wants his help. He would not say no ever regardless of the cost to you, regardless of the pain and the hurt that you're going to suffer, that you're going to go through. Some intimate partners of the week mistake the people-pleaser for an empathic, kind, loving, altruistic, saintly sort. They appear this way, they appear this way in public as well, in YouTube videos, in a variety of other settings. They appear to be kind-hearted, loving, compassionate, affectionate, empathetic, altruistic. They're anything but, of course, they are weak people-pleasers because they are terrified of people and they hate people. They hate women, especially. And people who fall for weak people-pleasers, they're in for a rude awakening because the weak people-pleaser pivots. He cheats, he lies, he betrays just in order to gain the approval and the continued presence of others. Many weak people misbehave consistently, all the time. They stray compulsively, they prevaricate habitually, they abuse substances, they engage in extreme sexual self-trashing. They poach the mates of their best friends, they act recklessly. These are all forms of self-harming, of course. Weak people-pleasers end badly, very, very badly in due time. Some high-functioning patients compartmentalize their mental illness, others cannot. Do not try to make sense of the choices and actions of miscreants and misfeeds, masquerading as your fake friends. Just move on with your life, forget about them, leave them behind because they are their own biggest punishments. They have to live with themselves forever and I cannot think of a worse penalty. Remember, you're under no obligation to sacrifice yourself and to love your fake friends. Your remote sympathy and pity are more than sufficient offerings. Safeguard your life, your sanity, your loved ones, your property, your ideas, stay away. Remove such toxic poisonous people from your life, post-haste, regardless of how agonizing such a breakup may be to you. No contact. As always been and still is the only solution, do not be a rescuer or a savior or a fixer, do not forgive and do not forget, lest you end up being in need of rescuing, saving and fixing yourself.