Toxic relationships

"Toxic" has been stretched until it covers a partner who is bad at apologising and a partner who monitors your phone. Those are not the same situation and they do not have the same answer, so the only useful thing this page can do is separate them.

Three categories, and the difference between them is not intensity. It is whether there is a pattern of control.

Two people who love each other and are handling something badly. Recurring arguments, a stretch of resentment, a bad year around a new baby or a bereavement or a job loss.

Markers: the conflict is about something identifiable, both people are distressed by it, and both can describe the other's position without contempt. Repair happens, imperfectly.

This is most relationships some of the time, and it responds to ordinary things — couples work, one honest conversation, the underlying stressor easing. Calling it toxic is a category error that makes it harder to fix, because it turns a solvable problem into a verdict on the person.

A relationship where the pattern itself is corrosive, regardless of intent. Neither person may be malicious and the relationship is still making both of them worse.

The most useful markers here come from John Gottman's observational work, where four behaviours predicted dissolution with striking accuracy — he called them the Four Horsemen:

• Criticism — attacking character rather than raising a behaviour. "You never" and "you always"
• Contempt — sneering, mockery, eye-rolling, superiority. The single strongest predictor in the data, and the one most corrosive to the person receiving it
• Defensiveness — meeting a complaint with counter-complaint rather than any acknowledgement
• Stonewalling — withdrawing entirely from the interaction

Add three more that show up in the accounts: you are a worse version of yourself in this relationship, you have stopped telling friends what happens, and the good periods function as relief rather than as happiness.

Toxic relationships can sometimes be repaired, and it takes both people wanting to and usually a professional in the room. What they will not do is resolve by one person trying harder.

The line is a pattern of control, and it is a different thing from conflict — Evan Stark's term for it is coercive control, and Michael Johnson's typology distinguishes it from situational couple violence precisely because the two behave differently and need different responses.

What it looks like:

• Monitoring — phone, location, messages, spending
• Isolation from friends and family, usually gradual and framed as closeness
• Financial control
• Threats, including threats to self, to pets, or to children
• Any physical violence, including what is described afterwards as an accident or a one-off
• Being made to doubt your own memory of events
• Sexual coercion

This is not the same as a toxic relationship and does not have the same answer. Couples counselling is not recommended where there is coercive control — several bodies advise against it, because it can be used against the person disclosing.

If any of this is familiar: in the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and 24 hours. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. Both take calls from people who are unsure whether what is happening counts.

One thing worth knowing that most articles leave out, because it changes what a good plan looks like: leaving is the most dangerous period, and the risk research is unambiguous on this. Anyone preparing to leave a controlling relationship should do it with a specialist service rather than alone.

Not how bad it feels. Ask instead:

Are we both trying to solve a problem, or is one of us managing the other?

In a difficult relationship, two people are on the same side of a problem and losing. In a toxic one, they are on opposite sides and both getting worse. In an abusive one, one person's behaviour is organised around controlling the other, and that is a different situation requiring different help.

And a note on "toxic" as a label for a person: it is used far more often than it is accurate, frequently about someone behaving badly under strain rather than someone who is dangerous. Relationships can be toxic. Applying it to a person forecloses the question of whether anything could change — which is the right conclusion sometimes and is worth arriving at rather than starting from.