Toxic Friendships: How to Finally Stop Stressing Over Your Fake Friends

Are you trying to break free of a toxic relationship?

Childhood friends, high school friends and even college friendships, all tend to have one thing in common.

Relationships between friends at any age and level can be complicated as hell!

That is why my portfolio of more than 400 stories contains lots of advice and opinions about dealing with friendships.

Although the experiences below occurred between female friends, friendship is friendship, and the same kind of problems can occur in male friendships (or even mixed gender friendships).

In my experience, women don’t necessarily care more about friendship than men. Men are just typically less likely to admit their true feelings about friendship.

It doesn’t matter what statistics do or don’t say about who cares about friendships more. What does matter, is learning how to stop stressing over fake friends, and breaking free from toxic relationships.

Life Lessons about Love

Of all the life lessons that we learn about love, most people would agree that romantic love sucks the most. But make no mistake, the love that is shared between good friends is not to be viewed lightly either.

In fact, losing a true friend can hurt, whether it’s a life long friend, a childhood friend, a high school or college friend, or a friendship that you develop and nurture late in life.

There are several queries, high on the list of questions that people tend to ask about relationships, and the pain of losing a friend. They include:

• People constantly ask why does it hurt when I lose a friend?
• They want to know can you grieve the loss of a friendship?
• They continue trying to analyze how does losing a friend affect you?
• And they always want to know how do you recover from a lost friendship?

As you can see from the above relationship advice questions, some of us don’t fully understand why we feel hurt if we lose a friendship; as if that shouldn’t be a normal reaction.

Of course, we’re not talking about in the event someone dies, and the friend is left to deal with that sort of grief. No one questions the way someone reacts in that type of situation.

But what about if you lose a friend because they move away, or they’re gone from your life for some other reason? What if they’re out of your life because they were toxic, and you knew you had to cut them lose?

These questions, and more, can come up, when we have to face living life without someone (or multiple someones) who once shared our time, our energy, and our hearts.

Am I the Toxic One?

HERE’S A LITTLE HISTORY ABOUT TWO OF MY FORMER FRIENDSHIPS

I have two former best friends that I no longer speak with (and they no longer speak with me). At some point, I started thinking:

“If I have lost two best friends then maybe it’s my fault, after all, I am the common denominator in both instances.”

I focused on one specific former best friend and recalled how a brief negative encounter had severed a ten year relationship.

I now know for a fact that she (we’ll call her Marie) was a toxic friend. I guess back then, I thought about some of the reasons why that was the case, and I made a wise decision. I hadn’t been in a hurry at the time to rekindle things.

Oddly enough, out of all the people I’ve strayed away from and don’t talk to anymore, she’s the one I seem to miss the most. I actually began to wonder and question myself, although I had been down that mental and emotional road before.

Could I possibly have been the toxic one in the relationship with my other friend (let’s make her Doreen)? I decided that definitely wasn’t the case, nor did I consider her a toxic or fake friend.

Doreen and I just had a miscommunication that we allowed to get out of hand; time did the rest. Years later when I finally made an attempt to reach out, either it fell or deaf ears, or she never got the message; she never responded back.

Oddly enough, although I still miss them both after all this time, the friendship I seem to miss the most is the toxic friendship I had with Marie. There’s just no understanding human nature.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about one or both of my former friends.

Toxic Friends Are Like Bad Drugs

For years, I literally had to use mental diversion tactics in order to stop thinking about my toxic friend Marie.

Even now, I still long for certain aspects of our relationship and wish things had turned out differently.

What the hell is wrong with me, craving a toxic friend like a bad drug!”

If you feel like that about a friend you know is toxic, don’t be so hard on yourself, because believe it or not, the feelings are normal. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Psychology Today says that ‘breaking up with a friend is a unique kind of pain’ but that doesn’t mean it’s uncommon to feel it.

Patching Broken Friendships

Some broken friendships can get help, maybe even friendship counseling, and manage to survive the different issues that lead to rifts.

But is it worth it to try and patch up a friendship where one person is a fake friend, or worse yet, a toxic friend?

I remember someone suggested that I search online for ways to patch up the broken friendship with Marie. The information I found helped me come to a realization.

It made me really reflect on the past relationship me and Marie had, and I didn’t like what I remembered.

The friendship that I was busy trying to mend was actually a toxic one. This was evident from all the things my friend and I did together (or didn’t do, if it wasn’t her idea).

Re-examining conversations and situations that we had experienced together made me ask myself: ‘Why do I want to make up with this person again?’

On the one hand, she was tons of fun to be with. She even helped me display a side of myself that no one else in my everyday world knew. I tried hard to weigh the pros and cons, and guess what? The pros didn’t win!

After much consideration and analysis, no matter how you look at it, toxic is toxic, and she was a TOXIC friend. Poison by any other name is still poison.”

The TAKEAWAY

The biggest takeaway I can offer, is to consider if your previous or current toxic friendship is worth saving, or worth fretting over. PERIOD.

Are you happy or at least content with your role in your existing friendships? Sometimes, you can put up with something for so long, you begin to accept the bad behavior as the norm.

Being treated poorly in a relationship by someone that you consider a friend is not something that is normal and you don’t have to accept it.

Since part of the problem can amount to what we believe is expected of us, as a friend, make sure you understand and recognize what true friendship looks like. A new Medium voice Siren Beach Queen (Aya) wrote some deep words about people in general, but I apply it to toxic friends:

“They rather would see you cry then to smile and push through.”

• True friends want to see you happy and want to see you succeed, so make sure you have genuine friends around you, and not the toxic kind.
• And above all, make sure you’re doing all you can to be a true and genuine friend yourself, in all your friendly relationships.

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