Almost every article on this is a checklist, and the checklist is the problem. Run any decade-long friendship past twelve warning signs during a bad month and it will hit five of them, which tells you nothing except that friendships have bad months. The word has also been stretched a long way: it now covers a friend who is careless about replying and a friend who systematically undermines you. Those are not the same situation and they do not have the same answer.
The patterns worth trusting
Not incidents. Patterns — things that hold across a year, through their good moods as well as their bad ones.
Contempt with a joke attached. The remark about your job, your partner, your weight, usually in front of other people, usually followed by I'm kidding. One instance is a bad joke. A pattern is a position, and the joke is what makes it unanswerable, because objecting casts you as the one who cannot take it.
You have started editing yourself. You choose which news to share based on how it will be received. You have stopped mentioning the thing going well. This is the most reliable single marker available, and it is a fact about you rather than a claim about them, which is why it is hard to argue with.
The traffic is emergencies and it runs one way. Their crises are the content of the friendship. Yours get a brief acknowledgement before the subject returns. They are not pretending and the affection is real; you are also functioning as an unpaid service.
Nothing can be raised. You tried, once or twice, and it became about their hurt rather than your complaint, and you ended up apologising. A friendship in which honest feedback is not survivable cannot correct itself, and that is the actual problem — more than any individual behaviour on any list.
The friendship runs on a hierarchy. Advice flows one way. One of you is the competent one and the other is the ongoing project, and the arrangement is maintained by both — the senior party enjoys being consulted, the junior party gets absolved of deciding anything. It can persist for decades and it is corrosive in a way that is very hard to name from inside, because on the surface it looks like generosity.
You feel relief when they cancel. Small, immediate, and very hard to explain away afterwards.
One more thing about all of these: none of them is a single event. Each is a shape that holds across a year and through their good moods. That distinction is what separates a difficult friendship, which most long friendships are at some point, from one that is doing damage.
What looks toxic and usually is not
The half the checklists leave out, and where a lot of people asking this question actually are.
- A different communication style. Someone blunt reads as aggressive to someone indirect; someone indirect reads as passive-aggressive to someone blunt. Each is certain the other is doing it deliberately. Usually neither is.
- Lower capacity, not lower interest. A friend in depression, burnout, new parenthood or grief has less available for everyone, and it arrives looking like coldness. An imbalance with a cause and an end is a season, not a character.
- Jealousy about a life stage. A friend who is strange about your promotion, your relationship, your move. It is often real envy, it is usually survivable, and it says more about where they are standing than about what they think of you.
- A mismatch of contact needs. One of you texts daily, one surfaces monthly. The monthly one is not withholding anything. This mismatch generates an enormous amount of avoidable grief in both directions.
- An old friendship, outgrown. Nothing is wrong. You are different people now and the conversation runs out after forty minutes. That is a fade, not a poisoning, and reaching for toxic is often a way of making an ordinary ending feel justified.
- One thing they did that you have never raised. A real injury, sitting there for two years, quietly recolouring everything since. From inside it now feels like a pattern because you have thought about it a hundred times. It is one event with a hundred rereadings, which is a different thing and has a different repair.
- Being bad at replying. Genuinely worth separating out, because it produces enormous quantities of unnecessary hurt. Some people are terrible correspondents and entirely reliable in person. The delay means nothing about you and reading it as a message is the error.
What to do, and what this page will not do
- Write the pattern rather than the incident. One sentence with a frequency in it. If you cannot supply a frequency, you may have one bad memory rather than a pattern.
- Raise one specific thing once, and watch what happens to it. How a complaint is received tells you more than the complaint does.
- Notice who you are for two hours afterwards. Consistently smaller is the signal.
- Do not deliver a verdict. You're toxic forecloses any answer, and the word is applied to people far more often than it is accurate.
This page will not tell you whether your friendship is toxic, and anything offering to decide that from a symptom list is selling a certainty it does not have. One real exception: where there is a pattern of control — monitoring, engineering distance between you and everyone else, control over money or movement — that is a different category with a different answer, and the entry on toxic relationships sets out where that line sits and why it is not a matter of degree.
What it depends on
The same friend produces very different friendships depending on who is standing opposite them. Somebody who cannot say that landed badly will accumulate a decade of unraised things and eventually experience the friendship as poisonous — and the friend may never once have been told. That is not a defence of the friend. It is the difference between a friendship that could have been corrected and one that could not, and it is worth knowing which you have.
The Boundaries Check reads four boundaries and reports which is most open. For most people arriving at this question it explains the last five years better than a symptom list will, because the recurring element is rarely the friend. The longer version is the entry on personal boundaries.