Study: Yes, You Should Facebook Friend Your Middle School Nemesis, Show Her You’re Hot Now

RALEIGH, NC—It was a warm June afternoon when Carrie Mondale received a Facebook friend request from Helena Schmidt-Kemp. 

“I had just come back from a run,” Mondale recalled. “And then I logged onto Facebook and saw that the spawn of Satan had found me. At first I thought: how dare she? I mean, that bitch once pinched my muffin top in front of our entire sixth-grade class and asked if I’d heard of Atkins. And she knew I was a vegetarian!”

Mondale was about to press delete when she saw the silver lining. 

“Helena doesn't know I’m thin now,” she explained. “I run almost every day. I weigh 125 lbs. God, I hope she looks like her mom. Her mom was so busted.”

Mondale accepted the friend request and immediately felt a rush of ecstasy.

"This will ruin her day for sure,” she laughed.

Mondale is not alone. A recent Johns Hopkins study found that feelings of prolonged euphoria accompany accepting friend requests from your middle-school arch-nemesis who doesn’t know that you're thin now. Actively seeking out the Facebook friendship of middle school frenemies—or even straight-up enemies—is correlated with the same sentiments.

“It doesn’t matter whether you friended them or they friended you,” Amy Stewart, Ph.D., the study’s co-author, noted. “The idea is that you showed that hoe that you lost your puppy fat and that’s extremely satisfying. You don’t even need the confirmation that they actually cry on their pillow tonight. You can just believe that they will.”

A companion study found that showing your high-school nemesis that you survived puberty yields similar results. 

“I was at my 20th high school reunion when Kylie Samuels came up to me,” said Idina Jacobs. “She was like, ‘Your skin looks great! Did you go on Accutane?’ And I was like, ‘No, I turned 37.’”