Toxic friendships are harder to leave than toxic romantic relationships, and the reason is almost embarrassingly simple. They’ve had years to convince you that the problem is you. They borrow the vocabulary of real friendship, the loyalty, the shared history, to make leaving feel like a betrayal. That’s what makes them so effective and so easy to miss.
A 2025 study by Muhammad Arifin and Andi Muspida interviewed eight undergraduates who were in or had recently left toxic friendships and found the same things surfacing in their accounts over and over. The researchers came to a conclusion that’s as useful as it is obvious in hindsight. Most people don’t identify the dynamic until they’re already deep in it, and leaving is harder than it has any right to be.
Performing Belonging
The thing that keeps most people in a toxic friendship isn’t affection. It’s a calculation. This group, even a bad one, is better than being alone.
Study participants described staying in groups that excluded them, picked on them, and made them feel small, because belonging somewhere, even somewhere that treated them badly, felt safer than social invisibility. One interviewee described being noticed only when the group needed a target, and staying anyway because that was still better than the alternative.
Running on Empty
Toxic friendships don’t have some big blow-up—they drain. Participants talked about passive-aggression, exclusion, and low-grade peer pressure wearing them down over months and years until they lost track of whether they were even allowed to be upset about it.
“I knew she wasn’t treating me right, but I kept thinking maybe I was the problem,” one participant told the researchers. The self-doubt is part of the design. By the time people started withdrawing from classes and friendships outside the group, they’d long since stopped attributing it to the right cause.
The Intimacy Trap
A 2024 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence points to something the Arifin and Muspida research describes but doesn’t name. Closeness is what makes toxic friendships so effective.
The confessions, the shared history, the things you said when your guard was down—none of that goes away when the friendship goes south. It gets repurposed. The more real the friendship once was, the more someone has to use against you.
Finding the Exit
What actually gets people out is almost never a decision. It’s a moment—usually small, usually from someone on the outside—that makes everything they’d been normalizing suddenly feel strange.
One participant described a classmate saying she was “actually really kind” and not knowing what to do with that, because she’d stopped thinking it was true. That’s the whole story, really. Someone saw her as she really was, and she remembered she was allowed to expect that.
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