It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, partly because your friends will almost never tell you. “We generally have a bias toward being self-serving,” says Andrea Bonior, a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of The Friendship Fix. “We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt more than we should.” While a partner might pick a fight, and a sibling will call you out, a friend is more likely to just gradually stop texting back. You might never find out why.
One of the fastest ways to sour a friendship is to make someone feel like a backup generator: only useful in emergencies.
Bonior says transactional behavior is common in adult friendships, too: “It’s like the cliché of the grown child who only calls when they need money.” It’s worth asking yourself whether you’re that friend to someone else. Bonior poses a diagnostic question: When’s the last time you reached out just to say hello, or to see how your friend was doing? If you can’t remember the last time, your friend probably can.
You never initiate
None of those really hold up. “Part of it is just taking the initiative and showing you care,” Bonior says. “Even if you’re not inviting them to your house, you can be the one to say, ‘Hey, let’s go have lunch at a restaurant.’”
A few different versions of this tendency exist, Bonior says, and all of them get exhausting fast. There’s the one-upper, who hears about your stressful week and immediately tops it with her own. There’s the interrupter who can’t let the other person finish their sentence. And then there’s the old pal who somehow never seems curious about anyone else. “I’ll hear people say, ‘I spent two hours having lunch with my friend, and she listened when I was talking, but she never asked a single question,’” Bonior says.
You’re flaky
Everyone cancels plans sometimes. The problem is when your friends start assuming you probably won’t show up.
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Friendship is supposed to involve support. But there’s a difference between opening up to a friend and treating them like an on-call crisis line.
That small check-in matters more than people realize. It signals that you see your friend as a person with their own emotional bandwidth—not just a place to put your feelings.
You can’t be genuinely happy for your friends’ wins
If a friend’s good news has ever made you flinch, you already know what this one is about. Bonior sees the dynamic show up constantly, especially among high achievers. “There’s always this kind of one-upmanship, and they find themselves being passive aggressive and not really wanting the best for their friend,” she says.
Ghosting used to be reserved for bad dates. Now it’s become a default move in friendships, too, and Franco thinks that’s a problem. “Behaviors that have become quite normalized in friendships, like ghosting or blocking people, aren’t necessarily helpful or healthy in long-term intimate relationships,” she says.
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A healthier move is to bring up what’s going on. An “I” statement does the job: “I felt kind of misunderstood in that moment when…” “Expressing conflict in an open, empathic way actually leads to more intimacy in a friendship,” Franco says.
You take friends’ feedback as a personal attack
“Very often, we’re closed off to moments of feedback because we experience it as rejection,” Kirmayer says, “or because we’re just not allowing it to penetrate. We say, ‘Oh, that’s about them, not about me.’”
You don’t have to immediately agree, Kirmayer adds. You just have to receive the feedback without making your friend regret bringing it up.
“If half of what you’re having conversations about with your friends involves gossiping about other people, at some point your friends are going to put two and two together,” she says. “‘Wait a second, when they’re talking to somebody else, they’re probably talking about me as well.’”
Once people start wondering what you say behind their backs, they stop trusting you with anything real.
You expect your friends to want the same things you do
“We want to give our friends the autonomy to choose their lives,” Franco says, “rather than judging them for not choosing the lives we think they should want.”
You stay surface-level because vulnerability feels risky
You can have a lot of friendships and still feel lonely in every one of them. Bonior sees this a lot: people who “bounce around with these low-level friendships that don’t go anywhere.”
From the outside, these friendships can still look full: constant texting, group chats, brunches every weekend. But real closeness usually requires someone to go first emotionally.
“Drop the mask,” Bonior says, “and let yourself be seen for who you really are.” If you feel exposed, that’s the first step toward closeness.
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