The friendship seesaw: When a friend is only happy if they are high and you are low

Toxic friendships don’t usually begin with betrayal or cruelty. According to best-selling author and therapist Marisa Peer, they begin the moment one person needs the relationship to stay unequal — and doesn’t care what that does to the other person.

All friendships go through difficult periods. Life changes, people drift, misunderstandings happen and the balance between giving and receiving naturally shifts over time. But there is an important difference between a friendship that’s under strain and one that has quietly become toxic. The defining feature isn’t constant conflict or obvious manipulation — it’s a struggle for power.

Most of us expect friendship to feel equal. There will be moments when one person needs more than the other. A redundancy, a divorce or a bereavement may temporarily tip the balance, with one friend doing more of the listening, reassuring or practical support. Then life settles, the weight shifts again and the friendship finds its equilibrium.

It is this movement, rather than perfect balance, that keeps a friendship healthy. According to therapist Marisa Peer, that is also the simplest way to recognise when a friendship has become toxic.

“Imagine a seesaw,” she says. “In a healthy friendship, both people are sitting on it equally. In a toxic friendship, one of them doesn’t want equality. They want superiority.”

Friendship based on inequality

It is a striking image because it captures something many people struggle to articulate. Toxic friendships are often described in terms of meanness or manipulation, but Peer believes those behaviours are really symptoms of something deeper. “A toxic friendship isn’t really based on friendship,” she says. “It’s based on power.”

That distinction matters because difficult friendships and toxic friendships are not the same thing. Friends disappoint one another. They argue over holidays, drift apart during busy periods and discover they have completely different priorities. One friend might love extravagant birthday celebrations while the other would happily forget the occasion altogether. One may crave constant contact while the other disappears for weeks at a time before picking up exactly where they left off.

“A difficult friendship doesn’t mean you’re not great friends,” says Peer. “It just means you don’t recognise that you’ve got completely different needs.” Difference requires understanding. Toxicity requires somebody to come out on top.

Power struggles in toxic friendships

The power struggle at the heart of a toxic friendship is rarely obvious. There are few explosive confrontations or dramatic betrayals. Instead, it is woven into ordinary conversations.

Perhaps your promotion is met with a joke that somehow takes the shine off your achievement. Your new relationship becomes an opportunity to point out your flaws. Every confidence you share somehow circles back to the other person’s experiences. You leave lunch wondering why you feel deflated, even though nothing particularly terrible was said. “It’s quite clever, quite subtle,” says Peer.

Over time, one friend begins to occupy more space. Their opinions carry more weight. Their problems dominate every conversation. Their successes deserve celebration while yours somehow become inconvenient. The seesaw stops moving.

One person remains comfortably elevated while the other does the emotional work of keeping the relationship alive.

Perhaps the most unsettling part is that many people recognise this dynamic and still struggle to leave. Peer believes that has less to do with weakness than familiarity. “One of the weirdest things about the brain is that it loves what it already knows,” she says. “It wants what is familiar and known.”

Why we stay in toxic friendships

Human beings are remarkably good at adapting to emotional climates. Once a pattern becomes familiar, it can begin to feel normal, even when it leaves us consistently unhappy. We adjust our expectations. We tell ourselves our friend is simply stressed or blunt or going through a difficult patch. We become so focused on maintaining the friendship that we stop noticing how much of ourselves we are giving away to preserve it.

Healthy friendships allow both people to succeed without keeping score. They make room for disagreement without punishment. They create enough emotional safety for each person to occupy the same amount of space.

The seesaw still moves. One friend leans harder during difficult times and the other willingly carries more of the weight, secure in the knowledge that the balance will return. In a toxic friendship, it never quite does.

One person remains at the top because the relationship depends upon staying unequal. The other continues pushing from the ground, hoping that one more conversation, one more compromise or one more act of generosity will finally restore the balance.

The hardest truth may also be the simplest. Friendship was never meant to feel like a contest. The healthiest relationships are not the ones in which nobody ever struggles. They are the ones in which neither needs to make the other lower in order to give themselves a high.

Words: Lucy Rawlinson, Images: Shutterstock, Freepik