7 Traits of Subtly Toxic Friends

When I went to college, I was popular for the first time in my short, nerdy life. I’d been a bookish dweeb until the age of 18. Suddenly, I was hot and I was cool. People wanted to hang out with me, get my approval, be in my circle.

In those heady months, I could scarcely believe I’d managed to stumble into the popular crowd seemingly by accident. And I was terrified to lose my newfound status. I clung to those incredibly cool friends with every ounce of determination I had in me, dedicated to staying popular no matter the cost.

Of course, if you’ve read the title of this article you’ll realize the cost was much higher than I realized at the time: these friends were horrible for me, and they left marks that haven’t entirely faded. They brought out the worst in me — my pettiness, my love of gossip, my willingness to conform, my vanity. And they made me want to tamp down what I now love most about myself — my weird quirks that make me who I am.

These are the seven traits that I now know are bright red warning signs for toxic friends, and how you can spot them.

1. They have a vested interest in your insecurity.

One of the biggest flags you’ll notice straight away is that toxic friends make you feel bad. Not just kind of guilty, or sometimes anxious. That’s normal as long as it’s infrequent — nobody is perfect. Toxic friends make you feel bad nearly all the time.

This is because you never know where you stand. Toxic friends don’t have a vested interest in making you feel welcome or secure, so you’re a little bit off-kilter with them. This constant uncertainty corrodes your trust levels, and the end result is that you feel unhappy pretty much always.

Some of the acute reasons can take the form of making small, hurtful comments, or implying your interests are lesser than theirs, or putting down your significant other.

“There has to be balance in a friendship for it to be healthy — not one person whose needs get met and another whose needs are overlooked.” — Florence Isaacs, author of Toxic Friends/True Friends

To determine if a one-off comment is a cause for concern, experts suggest reflecting on how you feel after spending time with your so-called friends. Sometimes the charm gets turned on and you feel amazing basking in their glow, but inevitably the longer pattern is that you feel smaller, diminished, or like you’re always trying to catch up.

2. They absolutely refuse to respect your boundaries.

It didn’t matter if it was a drug I didn’t want to take, a new song they thought I should like, or a friend they didn’t think was cool enough: there was no boundary on what my toxic friends thought they could get me to do. I’m ashamed to say that most often, I caved.

It can be hard to put your finger on this, especially if you’re younger and still learning your own boundaries, though. Sometimes good friends will push on your decisions, too.

To determine if your friends are toxic, or if they’re just encouraging you outside your comfort zone, try to think of the last three times you wanted to stick to a course of action and were turned away from it. Did you want an early night but end up staying out? Did you enjoy a new cafe but got told it wasn’t any good?

Reflect on where you’ve strayed from your choices, but more importantly on the outcomes of those choices. Good friends know that encouraging you to try new things is not the same as violating boundaries. By examining the outcomes, you’ll know whether your friends have your best interests at heart — or theirs.

3. Your friendship is on their terms.

The first time Maisie knocked on my door at 2 am, makeup smeared and reeking of rum and coke, weeping because her boyfriend had just dumped her and I was the only person she could talk to about it, I’ll admit it — I was flattered. The next week, when she did it again because she’d spotted her ex kissing someone else, I was still touched. She trusted me. She needed me. I was the one person in her life who knew what was going on. Any time she needed me, I dropped everything to make it happen.

A few months into our fast friendship, I needed help and didn’t know where to go. I knocked on her door, as she so often had on mine. I heard her shush someone, but no one came to the door. I knocked again, but she stayed quiet. As I walked away, I heard someone giggling inside.

“There’s a big imbalance between what you’re giving and what you’re getting [in a toxic friendship].” — Dr. Andrea Bonier, clinical psychologist.

It was easy for her to rationalize it the next day when I confronted her about it. She made excuses and I believed them. But the truth should have been obvious for me to see: she only cared about me when it was beneficial to her. Our friendship was not on even footing.

People can make mistakes, and you can’t always be the top priority in your friend’s life. But if it happens regularly, if you feel like you’re giving more than you’re getting, it won’t be sustainable in the long run.

4. They encourage your worst traits.

Nobody is 100% good all the time, and I certainly won’t claim that distinction either. I gossip, I’m judgemental, and I can be lazy.

There’s nothing wrong with an occasional bout of gossip, or a split-second judgment, but with my cool new friends, they goaded me into playing it up to the nth degree. It was entertaining for them, and I wanted to make them happy.

I made choices that were badly out of line with who I thought of myself as a person. I hurt other people. I disappointed myself.

This is difficult to see in yourself — you can all too easily get caught up in the rush of belonging, in being what other people want you to be. The best test for this trait is to see how your relationships with outside people change. How does your family react when you make choices your potentially toxic friends would encourage? When you make a new sarcastic comment, are your older friends hurt?

Older relationships will have a better idea of your true personality, and will be an excellent litmus test to see if your toxic friends are encouraging your worst traits.

5. They are incapable of showing you tough love.

The difference between toxic friends and good friends is like the difference between not brushing your teeth as self-care, and forcing yourself to work out as self-care. One gives you a small luxury in the moment that you later regret, while the other actually helps you even if you resent it at the time.

In high school, I was a nationally ranked competitive swimmer. When I went to college, I drank and partied my way off the swim team. Even though my so-called friends knew swimming was important to me, they encouraged me to be lazy, to sleep in, to stay out late. When I finally had good friends, they pushed me to push myself. They were the ones who walked me to the pool to sign up when I was scared, and they were the ones who told me it was OK to miss a party because I had practice the next morning.

Good friends encourage you to be your best self, even when it isn't the obvious option. Toxic friends aren’t invested in your continued well-being. Psychology research shows that good friends may “choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term,” to help them accomplish goals. We call this tough love.

To determine if your friends want to see you succeed or if they don’t care, you can try a test. Tell them that you have an important goal for yourself — exercising, an exam, or even just to complete a life-admin task. Then see how they react when they know this matters to you: how do they prompt you into success? If they don’t, that can be a sign they are a drain on your life.

6. You‘re terrified one mistake could make them leave.

This was the worst one for me: the feeling that I was constantly on the verge of losing my friends. To this day, I’m still afraid that one wrong move could put me out of my friend group forever, even though my real friends have never given me a reason to doubt.

When I didn’t make it to a party, I’d be excluded from the cool group for a week. If I maintained a relationship with someone they thought wasn’t cool, they’d make cruel remarks about us. I was always low-grade terrified that any mistake or slight deviation from their wishes would leave me alone and friendless. With my current friends, no matter how much I mess up, I know that they’re there for me.

A constant sense of FOMO and a fear of stepping out of line are the trademark signs than your friends are holding your relationship as a weapon over your head. If you’re reflecting on your relationships and know that if you don’t toe the line, you’re out, it’s a dead giveaway you’re dealing with a toxic friend.

This one can be tricky to identify because all friends have boundaries you shouldn't cross. But if their boundary is doing anything that even slightly deviates from their wishes, and if they punish you for it, then it’s not a boundary: it’s a weapon.

7. They aren’t evil villains.

The hardest realization for me coming realizing my friends were toxic was that there was no active malice. This wasn’t Gossip Girl, and they weren’t out to get me. They just didn’t care.

Sometimes toxic friends are intentionally horrible, but the ones that are hardest to spot are those that aren’t. They simply don’t care enough to make you pursue your passions, follow through on plans with you, make the effort to say the right thing at the right time to you. A good friendship isn’t a neutral state; it takes work. Toxic friends just can't be bothered.

This can be really difficult to swallow because all of pop culture portrays toxic friends as evil. They’re not. Most often, you’re just not their priority.

There’s no one way to determine this toxic trait for sure. All you can do is trust your gut and examine your emotions before and after dealing with them. Sometimes it’s hard to see because you don’t want them to be unhealthy for you. I was terrified of losing my cool status, and I was willing to bury my head in the sand for two years to avoid confronting the truth. But I was never as important to them as they were to me, and that manifested itself into a deeply unhealthy relationship. Not because they were horrible, but because our relationship was.

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All seven of these signs can be boiled down to one: you know. You already know if your friends are toxic, because you feel drained trying to keep up. You aren’t happy when you’re with them, you’re not happy when you’re away from them. They make you feel like you have to compromise on the things that are important to you, and they bring out the worst in you.

The bad news is it will never come down to one comment, or one bad fight. Toxic friends and good friends both make mistakes, make you feel bad, make you doubt yourself on occasion. It’s the longer-lasting pattern that will be your true tell.

By closely analyzing your feelings, especially after interacting with them, you’ll know if your friends are toxic for you, even if the signs are very subtle. Good friendships are those that fulfill and sustain you. Bad friendships are those that leave you feeling like you live on a razor’s edge, one mistake from losing it all.

The wealth of psychological studies on toxicity in friendships points to a single fact: it will be hard to spot them, especially because they don’t hate you, they just don’t care enough to be good friends. But it’s worth it to identify and drop your toxic friends.

7 Habits of Subtly Toxic Friends originally appeared on Medium