You probably have a mental list of friends who have annoyed you over the years: the flake, the one-upper, the one who treats you like a free therapist. But somewhere out there, you’re on someone else’s list.
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.
That’s why looking inward is one of the most important things you can do for the friendships you want to keep. Here are the patterns experts say are worth gut-checking against yourself.
You only show up when you need something
One of the fastest ways to sour a friendship is to make someone feel like a backup generator: only useful in emergencies.
Long before she became a social psychologist at UMass Dartmouth, Mahzad Hojjat experienced this dynamic herself. Whenever one particular friend showed up at her house during high school, “I was like, ‘Oh, she wants something from me’—because she did,” says Hojjat, co-editor of the book The Psychology of Friendship. “I knew then that she wasn’t a true friend, because it was a one-way street.”
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
If you’re always the one being invited, and never the one doing the inviting, Bonior wants you to take an honest look at why. She tends to hear the same excuses: Your apartment is too small; you hate hosting; you’re not a planner.
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.’”
If your friend is always the one organizing dinner, checking in, and keeping the friendship alive, it’s worth acknowledging that effort. Bonior suggests this language: “I wish I was better at this stuff. I want you to know how much I appreciate that you’re the one who makes the plans.” Otherwise, the message your friend receives is that the relationship matters more to them than it does to you.
You make every conversation about you
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.
Yet it’s hard to catch yourself doing any of this in real time. Bonior’s fix is what she calls a “conversational postmortem.” This isn’t about beating yourself up after every conversation—it’s about getting curious. After you hang up from a FaceTime call or get home from brunch, ask yourself a few questions. Where did you steer the conversation back to yourself? What did your friend mention that you didn’t follow up on? Did you cut him off or try to talk over him? When did the conversation go quiet on her end? Next time, you’ll know what to listen for.
You’re flaky
Everyone cancels plans sometimes. The problem is when your friends start assuming you probably won’t show up.
Chronic flakiness changes the emotional temperature of a friendship surprisingly quickly, says Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist in Montreal who specializes in adult friendships. When someone repeatedly backs out at the last minute, takes days to respond, or treats plans as optional, people stop feeling prioritized and eventually stop inviting the fickle friend altogether.
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Most flaky people aren’t trying to be hurtful. Often, they’re overcommitted, socially anxious, conflict-avoidant, or they say yes in the moment because they fully intend to go. “Questioning what is driving the behavior is really helpful,” Kirmayer says, “because it can give you a path forward.”
You use friends as unpaid therapists
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.
One of the easiest ways to avoid overwhelming people is simple: Ask for permission before unloading, says Marisa Franco, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. “You can say, ‘Hey, are you in a good place for me to share something?’”
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.
And if you suspect you’ve been leaning especially hard on someone lately, Franco recommends acknowledging it directly: “I feel like I’ve been depending on you a lot for things, and I wasn’t sure if that was feeling overwhelming.”
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.
A flash of jealousy is human, Hojjat acknowledges, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. “You have to keep it in check,” she says. A friend’s promotion or engagement deserves a real reaction, not a flat, “Wow, congrats.” Hojjat recommends remembering that your friends’ wins aren’t a referendum on your life—their promotion didn’t cost you yours. The friends who can actually celebrate you without an asterisk are rare, she says, so make sure you’re being one of them.
You ghost instead of having the hard conversation
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.
The instinct behind it usually isn’t malicious. Some ghosters convince themselves they’re sparing the other person: “They think it’s a kind act not to be as honest,” Franco says. But the silence rarely lands as mercy. People on the receiving end “don’t have closure, and they don’t understand what happened.”
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If you’re tempted to vanish on a friend, Franco recommends flipping the script and asking yourself this question: “Would you like your friend to back away without bringing up a problem?” Almost no one says yes. Instead, they agree it would feel cruel, cold, and worse than any real conversation.
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
When a friend works up the nerve to tell you that something you did hurt them, how do you react? If your first instinct is to dismiss it or spiral into self-pity, consider it a sign.
“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.’”
A better response sounds more like this: “That’s hard to hear, and I really appreciate you sharing that with me, because it helps me understand you better. I’m not exactly sure what my reaction is, but I want you to know that I’m going to be thinking about it.”
You don’t have to immediately agree, Kirmayer adds. You just have to receive the feedback without making your friend regret bringing it up.
You gossip about your friends to other friends
Venting is normal. Building friendships around tearing other people apart is different. Bonior says people eventually notice when every conversation seems to revolve around dissecting someone else’s behavior.
“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.’”
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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
This one can be especially hard to spot because it’s often disguised as concern. Your friend loses her job and decides to move across the country, and instead of responding with curiosity, you blurt out: “How could you do that?” Maybe you think you’re helping her avoid a mistake, or her choices trigger fears you’d never tolerate in your own life. Either way, what your friend hears is judgment.
“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.”
When friends feel evaluated instead of accepted, they naturally start withholding parts of themselves. “It makes people feel judged. It makes them feel like they need to hide. It makes them feel like they can’t share as much in the friendship,” she says. People stop feeling understood—or free to be authentic around you. “It makes them feel like you don’t trust them—or get them,” Franco says. “And you probably don’t, to be honest.”
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.”
Often, the problem isn’t a lack of socializing—it’s a lack of honesty. “People don’t build trust, and they don’t actually show themselves for who they really are, so they’re not seen and they’re not known,” she says. “They avoid letting people really get to know them. They avoid letting people see them vulnerable. They avoid asking for help, so the friendship stagnates.”
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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