Is it time we broke up with toxic?

A plea to retire the term

It’s around question five of ‘The Toxic Person Test’ when I have to put my phone down. Produced by a psychometric start-up, it’s positioned as a first step towards self-awareness; an exercise in acquainting you with the aspects of your personality that, as they put it, could get you cancelled. What they fail to mention in the marketing materials is that side-effects include weapons-grade anxiety and chewing on your lips until they bleed.

Five minutes and one more screen break later, I’ve learnt two things: there are few ways to shatter the peace of a Saturday morning scroll session as effectively as being confronted with your toxicity. And my ‘toxic style’ is ‘The Control Freak’ - a diagnosis which will come as a surprise to nobody who’s ever been on holiday with me.

As confronting as this exercise is, what separates this particular internet quiz from the hundreds of others like it is that the judgements it encourages you to make are exclusively about yourself; the end result being a resolve to resist itinerising every hour of annual leave, rather than a commitment to calling time on a friendship.

Tools of engagement

It feels glib to say toxicity is trending. And yet, the word has infiltrated our comms with all the grace of an oil spill in an ocean. If it was born in the seventeenth century - derived from Latin ‘toxicus’ and meaning ‘imbued with poison’ - it came of age in 2018, when Oxford Dictionaries chose it as their Word of the Year. But while it proved invaluable in communicating the decade’s vibe shifts (toxic masculinity; toxic work culture) it’s toxic’s utility as a social adjective that’s seen it reach ubiquity.

Quantifying toxic’s relational application is challenging, since nobody can agree on what it means. Forbes reports that more than 80% of women have had a toxic friend, citing traits like ‘being self-centred’ and ‘passive aggression’. At the other end of the spectrum, in a campaign from the charity Safe Lives to help young people avoid ‘toxic relationships’, the term was defined as ‘what adults call “domestic abuse”.’

That the definition encompasses the most egregious of relationship behaviour makes the casual deployment of toxicity ‘tools’ even more troubling. Typing variations of the term into Google delivers diagnostic devices from self-help books written by people with multiple degrees to internet quizzes written by…anyone. And while the content varies, there are two themes upon which the genre can agree: relationships require a hazmat suit and toxicity is grounds for termination.

But if toxic extraction is being billed as a health habit – and a quick browse of Amazon reveals it is – we have yet to see any evidence of it. Five years on from the word winning the linguistic equivalent of The Oscars, friendship isn’t exactly thriving. Those whose friendships were affected by the pandemic have shed an average of four of them since 2020, while the decline of the ‘social self’ among young people was the headline finding of last year’s Mental State of the World report - a report based on data from 64 countries with a remit best described as ‘haunting’.

Did we lose our friends because we called them toxic? No. From an economy that’s made the average pub session feel like a luxury to a housing crisis that’s made it harder to put down roots, there are plenty of hurdles that modern friendship has found itself jumping. But you don’t have to be a social psychologist to see that this word isn’t exactly helping.

Blame game

I’m not the only one troubled by ‘toxic’. A word cloud of my interview transcripts for this newsletter would see toxicity looming large. Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist who offers her clients friendship therapy, told me the term has made us ‘a bit too giddy at cancelling relationships’. Professor Jeffrey Hall, whose work on expectations you can read about here, told me the attention afforded to ‘toxic friends’ wildly misrepresents the degree to which problematic friendships are experienced.

But if there’s one person who’s spent more time on the toxic internet than anyone else, it’s Dr Jenny van Hooff. After doing some despairing of her own about the term, the sociology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, who specialises in ‘contemporary intimacies’, took an academic approach to it. Together with her co-author Dr Kinneret Lahad, she analysed 150 digital articles, listicles and quizzes which referenced the term ‘toxic friend’ or ‘toxic friendship’. While they found the word to be useful in very specific circumstances – identifying and labelling emotional abuse, for example – they also found it ‘reductive’ and ‘unhelpful’.

‘Friendship is as complicated as any other relationship,’ she tells me. ‘So generally speaking, when something is going wrong, both people are going to bear some responsibility for that.’ Not only does the term contribute to the idea that friendship is disposable (‘we found very little encouragement to work on or invest in these ties’) it can create an idealised view of what an optimally-functioning friendship ought to look like. ‘Nobody can live up to this ideal because we’re flawed human beings, so even when the friendship doesn’t break down, it can be irreparably damaged.’

When I ask Jenny what’s driving this desire to root out toxicity, she doesn’t miss a beat. ‘It’s a by-product of the self-help era, in which the individual is the most important thing,’ she continues - and ‘toxic’ is the tip of the iceberg. ‘The “toxic friends” trope is just one example of the widespread use of therapeutic language that started as a good thing, but is now being weaponised in the context of friendship.’

Self-help

She’s referring to therapy-speak: the democratisation of psychological concepts made possible by the access to mental health professionals that the internet has afforded us. That this access has helped millions is undeniable. But from memes which grant you permission to cancel plans in favour of a bubble bath to TikToks telling you how to end a friendship, it’s the casual deployment of therapeutic tools to help us navigate the business of connecting that’s raised eyebrows and hackles.

If the backlash began in the comments section of the now-viral TikTok by US psychologist Dr Arianna Brandolini, whose conversational templates on how to break up with a friend included lines like ‘I don’t have capacity to invest in our friendship any longer’, the mic-drop moment came when the world’s most famous therapist weighed in. In her Vanity Fair interview in June, Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the couples therapy podcast Where should we begin? articulated this paradox better than anyone else. ‘Labeling enables me to not have to deal with you. But in the end, it creates more and more isolation.’

While it earned fewer column inches, a paper published in April by Canadian researchers called Friendship, Intimacy, and the Contradictions of Therapy Culture makes for similarly compelling reading. As well as finding that those struggling with friendship were prone to deep reflection on it (God I feel seen) they concluded that modern therapy culture - ‘with its emphasis on individual wellbeing and healthy over ‘toxic’ relationships’ – is doing two things. First, it’s raising our friendship expectations (them again), while diluting the intimacy we share with them. Or, as they put it, the convening of therapy-speak and friendship can ‘kill the very phenomenon it’s trying to save.’

Adding value

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ‘toxicity’ is thriving now. The pandemic reshaped our social selves in ways researchers are still unravelling. And it wouldn’t be surprising if an extended period of isolation, coupled with considerable health anxiety, has left us feeling a bit suspicious of each other. That friendship also lacks the rulebook of other relationships means it’s all too tempting to outsource these decisions to other people. It’s the reason I asked the internet if I was toxic instead of putting those questions to myself.

But I think there’s a case for bringing these decisions back in-house. While the democratisation of therapeutic tools has done untold good, when complex concepts are condensed into captions, we can - as Perel puts it - ‘lose the nuances’ of what it means to be humans existing around each other. This doesn’t mean navigating friendship alone (this newsletter was conceived on the premise of asking for help). Nor does it mean tolerating behaviour that’s affecting your wellbeing. But I think it begins with reconnecting with our social instincts; only you inhabit your social world, and only you can ever truly discern a friendship that requires you to walk away from one that’s worth the work.

I ask Jenny if she’s implemented any changes to her own social circle off the back of her research. ‘I’m definitely a better friend than I was,’ she reflects. ‘When I was looking at some of the traits of toxic friendship – avoidance and things like that – I’m guilty of that. We all are.’ What’s changed, she tells me, is invoking an attitude of compassion. ‘Compassion towards myself for not always having the traits of this ideal friend. But that my friends aren’t, either.’

For Jenny, the most powerful thing you can do to improve your friendships is to override the narrative that’s instructing you to put yourself first. ‘I think we tend to treat our friends a bit like commodities, as though they’re there to serve us in some way,’ she continues. ‘If we can treat these relationships as reciprocal, it becomes easier to recognise their value in our lives.’ And if you’ve read this far down a newsletter about friendship, you probably don’t need me to tell you connecting with your friends is an act of self-care more powerful than any bubble bath.