We all love joking around with our friends; playful insults and burns are a core part of my love language.
But sometimes, it is hard to distinguish between harmless jokes and the signs your friend doesn’t respect you.
Toxic friendships can be really hard to navigate. There is less literature on how to deal with bad friends in comparison with how to deal with bad romantic relationships.
How to spot one, how to deal with one, and more importantly how to end one all get really messy if not handled right.
Not all friendships are created equal: there is your best friend, the friend you go out with, or and the friend you can count on to help you move or study with.
But what all good friendships have in common is that you both like each other.
And if you like someone, at the end of the day you want them to be their best selves and will do what you can to support them. Friends that are constantly putting you down, constantly using you to feel better about themselves, are not good friends.
Signs Your Friend Doesn’t Respect You
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, and friends, whether we realize it or not, make up a huge part of our lives!
If you have a friend who doesn’t respect you, it makes it hard to respect yourself. Friends are supposed to hold each other up and bring out the best in each other.
When you have a friend who is controlling, manipulative, and dismissive towards your feelings, you will start to see yourself through their eyes, not yours.
1. They are overly demanding.
You are not allowed to have any free time for yourself. They expect you to drop everything for you to be there for them.
It is important to have your friend’s back; but when they are throwing a fit every time your schedule doesn’t accommodate for them, it is time to reevaluate your friendship because they’re proving they don’t respect your time.
We all have our own lives, and oftentimes it is important to take care of yourself first before you give yourself to others.
A friend who doesn’t respect you doesn’t understand that. While you may say “oh if they want to hang out with me all the time it just means they like me a lot!,” the reality is when your friend expects your entire life to revolve around them, it actually means they don’t respect your time and shows that they believe you don’t exist as an individual outside of them.
When it comes to friends like these, it is important to set clear boundaries. If you don’t let them know what is too much, you will slowly start to become an accessory to your friend’s life.
Sometimes your friend isn’t doing this maliciously and just needs some good old-fashioned communication. But if your friend reacts angrily, manipulatively, etc. it shows that they don’t respect you as a person, and it is time to move on.
2. They are flaky and not in the way we are all a little flaky
This one is a tricky one because I’ll admit, there are times in which I am a little hard to get a hold of.
Sometimes when you are dealing with stuff in your own life, having to respond to texts can seem like a herculean task.
It is okay to flake sometimes; we can’t always be there for our friends, and that’s okay — that doesn’t make you a bad friend if you sometimes find yourself dipping out to take care of your own mental health.
However, if your friend consistently flakes out on you, that might be a sign of a bigger problem.
They constantly ditch the plans you two made together to go do something they think is “cooler,” or make up half-baked excuses to keep you out of the loop. They respond just fine to your other friends’ texts but purposefully ignore yours.
These are all signs that your friend is flaking out on you, not just because they are going through it, but because their evasive behaviour is specifically targeted towards you.
3. They belittle you to make themselves seem cooler in front of others
This happened to me all the time during high school; if there was a boy my friend wanted to impress and we were all hanging out in a group, my friend suddenly became a late-night comedian.
Playful insults when you two are together can be fine as long as it is balanced out with healthy doses of love. But when it is in front of strangers, and your friend is bringing up that one time you completely embarrassed yourself to get a laugh out of this random you don’t know, it can feel like a betrayal of trust.
If you are immediately the punchline to all your friend’s jokes, then it shows that your friend doesn’t take your relationship seriously. It shows that you as a person are a joke to them, and therefore means that they don’t respect you as much as they should.
Again, sometimes your friend might not be doing this maliciously, so it is important to communicate how you feel. But if they do it constantly, and are constantly embarrassing you in front of people you barely know, then it is time to dump them.
4. They get jealous really easily
Friends are supposed to support each other. Of course, it is normal to get a little jealous when your life is in the toilet, while your friend is once again getting promoted at their new job which they love.
But ultimately, you hopefully like your friend more than you are jealous of them. So when they do something great, you celebrate it.
But a bad friend gets jealous of everything good in your life. Whether it be a new partner, a new job, or a cool opportunity, they always react negatively.
They are always cutting, snarky, and always say something cruel to make you second guess your accomplishments.
If you have a friend like this, it shows they don’t want you to succeed. If you have a friend who sees every good thing in your life as a competition, it might be time to cut them out.
If you want to improve yourself, you can’t have people who see any progress you make in your life as something negative.