For how hyped up college is to high school introverts with a handful of very close friends, it sure has a hard time delivering on that promise of finally finding “your people.” And I don’t mean this as a slightly disappointed first year coming off the high of frosh week with a hangover and a few awkward text conversations that will burn away at your phone for the next few weeks while you try and find some other people to talk to. As valuable as that experience is, I mean this as a disillusioned third year who’s starting the friendship search again after investing years in friendships that don’t seem to have my best interests in mind — I mean this as someone who’s been blindsided by red flags I didn’t even know existed, and slowly making the terrible realization that the people I’ve spent a lot of my time with may not actually be the supportive friends for life I have desperately hoped they would become. And just as soon as I come to terms with that journey ahead of me, a global pandemic separates me from any and every hopeful new connection as well as all old connections that kept me going, and I wallow in what could have been.
But we’re not here to have a pity party, as fun as those are. This is about recognizing the self-destructive behaviors and attitudes that develop when a lot of people around you just aren’t your vibe, addressing them, and then confidently moving along to find people who are just nicer to you. So here are three realizations I’ve had identifying behaviors that bad friends exhibit and how to get out of a destructive situation.
Of course, this is based entirely off my own experience that I am sharing in the hopes that it may provide some sort of comfort to someone in a similar situation; people with roommates, coworkers, teammates, or anyone who you’re a little more stuck with than regular friends or classmates you have more of a choice over when you see. Moving on from friends is hard, but the mental toll it takes to live or work with someone who’s toxic is a little harsher.
With anything about mental health, consult a professional first and foremost — they’re actually qualified to give advice.
- The question of shame
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I found that a lot of people are very, very subtle in their put-downs, and they only start their commentary a couple months into a pretty solid courtship, when they feel comfortable enough to try out some put-downs (not always consciously, mind you). Little things, like increasingly less funny jokes at the expense of my silly mistakes, no longer interested in poking fun at the clumsiness inherent in simply stumbling over words or miscounting an amount. No, these jokes are a bit more geared towards shame, and that’s the key to recognizing when someone’s behavior (or your own; any time is a good time for self-reflection) is not meant to support you.
People who care about you will generally want you to improve, so if someone criticizes you or pokes fun at a particular habit, burning that bridge immediately may be a strong reaction. But, if their comments come out of a want to place shame on you, like emphasizing how much studying they do and how helpful studying is to their academic career whenever you struggle to get work done, that’s a kind of behavior meant to prove to you how great of a person they are, not how they’re concerned for your academic excellence. When a friend wants you to succeed they won’t push you by creating competition between the two of you, because that turns a support system into yet another space where you have to worry about whatever it is that you’re turning to that friend for sympathy — like academic standing, in my experience.
When their jokes stop being funny and they begin to use your struggles as a stepping stone to describe their success, you are not a friend to them. You’re a way for them to feel superior, and while you should always work to make your friends feel better about themselves, that should never come at the expense of your own self-image. If shame wedges its way into your interactions, that is when a relationship is no longer in your best interest.
- You are not stupid
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The first thing that goes out the window once you start having doubts about a friendship is your confidence in your own judge in character, because how could this person that has been so nice to me up until now possibly be toxic? I mean, they’re not even that mean; some people have friends or partners who outwardly abuse them or even physically assault them! How could my tiny problems with a friend who makes somewhat hurtful comments every once in a while amount to a bad friendship? I’m just overthinking things.
BAM! Now not only are you still considering your friendship with this person as good, but you’ve gotten it into your head that things affecting your mental health aren’t worth it!
Mental health is a hard thing to understand specifically because it encompasses issues like bad friends and instances of traumatic abuse, and it’s hard to consider your problems as important when they exist within the same realm as the extreme. You don’t have to be experiencing the extreme in order for you to want to take care of yourself, nor is that the only justification for deciding to let a friendship go; they don’t have to be an awful, terrible person in every way for it to be okay for you to cut them off. They can offer to go to the library with you, invite you to lunch, hold interesting conversation about music, but then subtly try to control the friend group and passive aggressively comment on your passions. Those are absolutely valid reasons to leave a bad situation. And you know what?
That does not make you a terrible person! Generally speaking, the expert about your well-being tends to be yourself, and if your personal judgement is saying something is off, do something about it! In many instances the “doing something about it” consists of a conversation between two adults hashing out differences, but I am talking about the much harder alternative of making the choice to leave something that previously meant a lot to you.
- Commitment to not giving them any commitment
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It is of the utmost importance that you do not allow yourself to be guilted back into a bad relationship if there is no sign of change on their part. Sounds a lot like romantic advice, but that’s for a reason; those kinds of relationships are a whole lot like friendships and roommate relationships in that those are the only people other than you who take up personal space in your brain. That’s your head they’re living in rent free; they better be welcomed there!
You’ll find that the more time you spend away from them or if they have a bout of not exhibiting the toxic behavior, you begin to forgive them. When the grating influence stopped being in my face all the time, I began to forgive bad friends for their behavior because the alternative was to confront them about it. In doing so, I would risk bringing up grievances that haven’t happened recently, which had the potential to diminish how they impacted me because, well, clearly its not a problem if it isn’t happening anymore, right? Well, change won’t happen if no one addresses it, and if you feel that bringing up your grievances will not help because they won’t accept your criticism, then there’s nothing to do but reconsider your friendship.
My struggle came in this form especially, and I find it quite inherent to the McGill code. None of this would be a problem if I felt my friend(s) would take my hurt seriously, and it’s hard to feel like they will listen to me when previously all our conversations about my struggles had turned into how successful they are at coping with the same thing. It creates a power dynamic, that they feel they are better than me in that regard, so why in the world would they accept criticism from someone they look down on?
I say this is a problem with McGill because it boasts itself as a top Canadian university with impressive alumni and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for those who attend. A community that orients itself around traditional structures of success, like money and careers respected by hegemonic structures, does not always make the effort to remind its students that there is more to life than trying to be “the best.” That kind of attitude leads to treating your friends like competitors you have to prove your superiority to, which leads to subtle toxic relationships like those I have experienced. What do you do then?
Well, you can try what I did: identify why you are feeling bad coming away from conversations with certain people, spend time with yourself and actual good friends who remind you that you’re not stupid or wrong for feeling the way you do, and move on so that you can dedicate your time and energy to people who deserve it, rather than people who are simply around to receive it.