My friend Amber (better known as Amboogie) shared an article by Christine Hassler about spring cleaning for relationships.  Lately, I’ve been culling “friends” from my Facebook account - folks I decided that I really didn’t want to share in the details of my life.  I’ve also been much more judicious when it comes to accepting friend requests, but I digress.

In her piece, Ms. Hassler identifies several ways to identify toxic friends:

• You always feel crummy after you talk to him/her and guilty if you don’t talk to them
• He/she is really hard on you or judges you harshly
• You walk on egg shells around him/her
• He/she is very negative, depressed, and/or does not take care of herself/himself
• You find there is not much room for YOU in the relationship - it’s all about her/him
• You are incredibly bored, uninspired, stressed out, or unhappy in the relationship

I’ve broken up with friends, and I’ve been broken up with.  That’s life, right?

The Fairly Mutual Breakup: I had to break up with a friend in undergrad. She was always very negative, pessimistic, but I overlooked it because we found total hilarity in the people and situations that surrounded us. However, there came a point where everything I liked was “stupid,” according to her: music, sororities, television shows. I got tired of hearing this and told her, “If you think everything I like is stupid, we shouldn’t be friends anymore.” She agreed. We moved on.

Getting the Boot: So who broke up with me? A friend of 7 years - not the closest friend, not the furthest away from me. Over the past several years, I would see him perhaps twice a year with our group of friends and give/receive a phone call on the other’s birthday. I got the boot because his wife hates me (which I actually find to be quite funny), and she made him choose. Ultimatums are never fun, but the choice was obvious. C’est la vie. My only qualm with this breakup was that he didn’t tell me he couldn’t come out to play anymore. He just ignored my phone call for his birthday. Hey, more daytime minutes for me! That’s fine. Moving on.

Giving the Boot: I’ve broken up with two friends in my life. I’d known one since I was 13, and when I met him again when I was 20, he was obnoxious, loud, and I didn’t see what we had in common anymore. The Final Straw was a very random drunk-dial that contained things much better left unsaid - at least, better left unsaid while unsober. I told him I thought we’d grown apart and that we couldn’t be friends anymore.  (We’re friends again now, but only after about 5 or 6 years of not speaking. Everyone’s mellowed out, grown up, whatever. Great.)

The second friend, I dumped today. We’d been friends for nearly 6 years. I won’t get into the details of why, but let’s just say this friendship fell into several of the categories on Ms. Hassler’s list. Not only that, but several things that he said to me crossed some major lines I’d never considered, let alone ever defined. It’s only once those lines were crossed that I realized the lines even existed. It was clearly time to for me to move on. He doesn’t understand why I broke off this friendship, and I don’t feel the need to explain myself or my actions, despite being goaded to do so several times via text message.

Ms. Hassler ends by telling us, “Ultimately your peace of mind is up to you and living a clean, conscious life with healthy relationships supports that.”  And you know what?  She’s so right. Don’t be afraid to give toxic friends the boot out of your life. Do it for your own health.