Tina Belcher, the eldest daughter in the hit show Bob’s Burgers, is a normal 13-year-old girl who enjoys boys, horses, and writing friend fiction. She obsesses over boys, mainly classmate Jimmy Pesto Jr., and loves boy bands. Despite being an active member of her school community, a part of the Hormone-iums, and a hall monitor, she is not seen as having many friends. She sticks with Jimmy Jr., Zeke, Tammy, and Jocelyn when she is not with her siblings, but it doesn’t take an eagle-eyed viewer to realize that Tammy and Jocelyn don’t realllyyyyy like Tina. They are extremely critical of her, from her interests to her appearance, and because of this, they often leave her out of group activities. There is a complete disconnect between her and her friend group, and she even acknowledges this is the episode, Vampire Disco Death Dance. She doesn’t feel like she has a friend group that gets her and fears that she must conform to their interests to maintain their interest in her. We see her frantic anxiety and mood swings as she struggles with this act to impress them. Many of her episodes end up with her accepting that these friends just have to do until she can find a better peer group.
Many college students have faced a similar dilemma. Goodwin University found that “more than one in three exchange students reported having no close U.S. friends.” When faced with college, the trend of befriending the first couple of people you meet rises, as this is how it worked in high school. This often leads to many friends disbanding within weeks. Dartmouth College stated in a published article from their sociology department that “It’s not just about having friends— it’s about having meaningful friends and making sure to invest time in those ties.” Tina does not spend much time with her friends by choice due to her irritation with them and their actions. Most of the time spent with Tina’s friends is not growing through mutual bonding but through conflict. Tina’s biggest moments of learning through her friends are fighting with her frenemy, Tammy, and learning to rise above to be better than her bullying. Because of the constant fighting, she has isolated herself from the kids her age and primarily spends time with her younger siblings. This sort of isolation from peers is what we typically see in first-year college students.
When you and your friends don’t get along, you lose your support system at school. You retreat into isolation and have no social outlet to push proper socialization with peers. In college, it is easy to stay in your room and not branch out. Most of the time, it is easier than being social. Having real friends makes it easier to want to explore and expand your horizons while at college. When you surround yourself with Tammys, you begin to feel “ignored, and this can leave you feeling exhausted, emotionally, and physically,” as Lincoln University discusses in an article about toxic friendships. Fighting to feel respected can break you down and make you believe that you don’t deserve to be respected.
In these negative relationships, you fear setting and/or enforcing boundaries, as we see with Tina in the episode with her hesitance to call out her friends’ behavior. How she is fearful of calling them out for ruining this experience for her, and how easily dismissed she is when expressing her frustrations. You begin to feel less confident and deny that there is any issue at all and that you are just the problem. Tina, in the show, is shown to be kind, caring, and passionate about the things she loves. However, we see Tina become extremely hostile when around her friends, attacking Tammy over a bracelet or purposely saying cruel things to Tammy, believing that she deserves it for her behavior. She often shows no remorse for these actions until she is shown how her perception of the events isn’t how others see it. Her friends often painted her as being in the wrong when the issue was mutual.
Surrounding yourself with the wrong people opens you up to outside influences on your behavior. It creates unnecessary stress, causing you to feel easily irritated or tense in social situations. Due to their extra or lack of reaction, it is harder to gauge your reactions to the same situations and begin to react in the same way due to it feeling normal. Your actions reflect the people around you.
How do we push past this? How do we move on and break free of the toxic cycle? According to publications like Healthline, it is pretty easy. Here are some takeaways to remember:
- Know you deserve good friends. You deserve good people around you who care about you. You deserve to be respected. One of the biggest factors in breaking out of these toxic friendships is realizing you’re worth more than mistreatment.
- Establish boundaries and hold firm to them. If you waiver on them, a toxic friend will step over and ignore them. A real friend will respect it, but a bad friend won’t.
- Be direct about your feelings. If you think your friend isn’t treating you right, be honest and open. Tell them how you feel. A real, honest friend will listen and validate your feelings.
- If all else fails, cut them off. It goes along with the first point, you deserve to be respected. If you aren’t being valued and respected, you deserve to be with people who do. There are so many people in this world that you have not even met. Losing these toxic people will not be the end.
At the end of the day, friends should make you feel good about yourself, not break you down. It would help if you didn’t have to negatively change yourself to fit in, right? So go write that friend fiction and play with your one-of-a-kind Chariot doll, but do it with the people who make you happy.