One of the most repeated truisms in social-science research is: “The No. 1 best thing for your well-being is your relationships.” Despite using this line myself many times, I’ve nevertheless questioned its universality. Who hasn’t nodded along in recognition while listening to a story about a nightmare roommate, or had a narcissistic relative who makes everything about himself? The Subreddit r/FriendshipAdvice would be a ghost town if everyone’s relationships were truly enhancing their quality of life.
An emerging body of research validates my sense that surely not all social ties are beneficial. Relationships with people who are draining, critical, or otherwise difficult can compromise our mental and physical health. Shira Offer, a sociologist at Bar-Ilan University, in Israel, who has studied these so-called negative social ties, told me, “For a long time, social scientists have focused on the positive aspects of relationships. And finally, we’re also seriously dealing with the negative aspects.”
Researchers have even come up with a term for the people who wear us down: hasslers. For a study published this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of sociologists analyzed data from thousands of people about individuals who often “caused them problems” or “made life difficult.” About a third of the sample knew at least one hassler, and on average, 8 percent of the people this group knew were hasslers. Women were more likely than men to have hasslers in their lives, and they knew more hasslers than men did.
Hasslers, the researchers found, tended to be people who irritated the study respondents but whom the respondents could not escape. Co-workers and roommates were frequent hasslers, as were relatives. “Family members were among the most common sources of hassling in people’s networks,” Brea Perry, an Indiana University at Bloomington sociologist and a co-author of the study, told me. “We think that’s because family relationships are emotionally intense; they tend to be long-lasting, and we often feel a sense of obligation to maintain those relationships.” Offer, who was not involved in this study, has found that many of her study participants named their aging parents as “difficult” relations.
The PNAS study didn’t measure what, precisely, hasslers do that is so annoying. But Karen S. Rook, a UC Irvine psychologist who was not involved with the study but who has researched similar phenomena, told me that her study participants frequently complain about people who fail to provide help when it’s needed, or who provide it in a grudging way. (Sometimes, Rook noted, people keep hasslers in their life because of how much they do need help, even if the help is imperfect.) Hasslers might also be overly critical, or exclude others from social activities. Or they might try to sabotage their friends—by egging them on to drink when they’ve sworn off the stuff, for instance, or to eat doughnuts when they’re avoiding sugar.
This behavior isn’t just irritating or upsetting. Having hasslers in one’s life is also associated with “lots of bad, bad things,” Perry said, including greater levels of depression and anxiety and overall worse mental and physical health. Perry and her colleagues analyzed their study subjects’ DNA through saliva samples and found that each additional hassler a person had was associated with faster epigenetic aging—at a rate of about nine months a hassler. (The study authors controlled for demographic factors and behaviors such as smoking, which can also affect biological aging.) Experiencing chronic tension with hasslers can cause the body to release stress hormones, Perry said, and over time, these hormones can drive inflammation, interfere with the immune system, and otherwise wear a person down.
Offer has written that negative social ties might be more consequential for our life than positive ones. The reason seems to be that people are more attuned to unpleasant encounters than they are to enjoyable ones, Rook said. Many co-workers complimenting an outfit blur into the background; the one colleague who says, “Bold outfit choice!” prompts a bathroom cry. “Negative experiences are more rare,” Rook said, “and they’re more shocking when they occur.”
On its face, the hassler research might appear to give people license to avoid their inconsiderate roommates or screen their meddling mom’s phone calls. But doing so might be shortsighted. If someone is in your life long enough, they’re bound to do something that irritates you—and you’re bound to do something that irritates them. Offer said that according to her research, not only are women more likely to be hassled, as they were in Perry’s study; they are more likely to be the hasslers. “Both men and women see the women in their families as particularly likely to be difficult,” Offer said. Women, she explained, tend to be “kin keepers”: the ones who make the casseroles, remember to send the Christmas cards, come over and hold the new baby—and perhaps give unsolicited child-care advice or unwanted housekeeping commentary while they’re at it. They hassle more because they do more.
The therapist Amanda E. White has a much-liked post on her Instagram account that reads, “Annoyance is the price you pay for community.” Roommates who leave dishes in the sink or cousins who have weird political opinions can be grating, yes, but they are also the people who might make you a meal when you’re sick or watch your kid in a pinch. When tallying how much someone hassles you, you may also want to consider how much they’ve done for you—and that, perhaps, being entirely free of hasslers is not the measure of a good life. To be alone, after all, may be worse than being hassled.
