toxic relationship definition — (a thorough investigation)
a relationship can be defined, sometimes, by the number of objects you no longer use that you cannot bring yourself to throw out. the green chair. the second toothbrush. the mug with the chipped handle that was, at some point, somebody’s favorite. you keep them and you don’t say why, and that, in the strictest sense, is the toxic relationship definition i am working with this morning.
writing this from the desk. it’s monday, somewhere around 10:18am. the boss is doing a vendor walkthrough two floors up. i have, by my own forecast, until the lunch crowd files past my screen.
so. the toxic relationship definition i am about to attempt is not the one your therapist would write, because i don’t pay a therapist. it’s the one a person arrives at, slowly, from a desk, while a phone on silent buzzes on the corner of the desk and a pile of unopened mail leans toward the floor like it has plans of its own. the phone has been buzzing on and off for forty minutes. i am not picking it up.
toxic relationship definition: a sustained dynamic between two people in which one’s emotional weather routinely overrides the other’s, where small dishonesties become a household language, and where the cost of staying becomes visible only in the objects, calls, and rooms you start avoiding. it is not one fight. it is the pattern of fights you stopped having out loud.
A RELATIONSHIP. IS NOT. A WEATHER REPORT. YOU LIVE IN IT.
the unused-object test, drafted at this desk on a monday
a toxic relationship leaves relics. not memories. relics. a memory you can revisit. a relic you trip over on the way to the bathroom. a memory has soft edges. a relic has corners and weight, and you have moved it to three different apartments without ever using it, and you cannot, for reasons you have not interrogated, throw it away.
my list, this morning: a green chair, in a photograph, in a folder named “evidence” — the chair itself is gone. a mug with a chipped handle in the back of the cabinet; i drink from a different one. a paperback they recommended, with my name on the inside flap in their handwriting. a pair of running shoes; i don’t run, i never ran, they thought i would.
each is a small, quiet monument. each has lost its function but kept its job. the job is to remind me that the version of me who lived in the relationship existed. throw the relic away and that version has nowhere to live. so the relic stays. that, on a monday, is the toxic relationship definition i can stand behind: a relationship you are still inside, even though it ended, because the objects haven’t agreed yet.
the phone is still ringing, and tom is on the other end
the phone is doing the small buzz phones on silent do, which is the loudest version of silent there is. the voicemail has been full for eleven months. that is by design. when no one can leave anything new, no one can ask for anything specific, and specificity is, broadly, the enemy of a person with a pile of mail to his left.
the not-picking-up started, i believe, in 2019, with a very specific person whose calls i had to triage in real time, in my kitchen, with the water running, pretending the water was why i couldn’t talk. the kitchen is gone now. the not-picking-up stayed. for the family resemblance to manipulation, you can read the post on defining a toxic person.
tom called yesterday. tom has a wife, two kids, and a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. tom calls maybe once a quarter, and when he calls, i look at the phone and let it ring. tom is not toxic. tom is, by every measurable definition, the opposite. but the not-picking-up is not about tom. the habit is older than him, and tom inherited it the way you inherit a draft from a window that has been sealed for years. he texted instead: “call when you can”. i may call thursday. thursday is, traditionally, when i do things.
the group chat, muted since february, still glowing
there is a group chat on my phone, muted since february, with 43 people in it. some i know personally. some, i think, were added by accident. it is named, optimistically, “lunch crew”, which is funny because at least four of them no longer work in this country. when i muted it, nothing changed except my pulse. that, in itself, was a piece of data. the unread number, as of this morning, is in the four-digit range. opening it would be a commitment. i have not made a commitment to anything since approximately 2019, possibly later.
the savings-account problem and the relationship problem are the same shape
i’ll put it on the table and you can take it or leave it: “savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy.” the entire premise — that you set aside a small amount each month, calmly, while the rent does what the rent does and the bank app glows in the corner of your phone like a small unfriendly moon — is a fantasy maintained by people whose lives have a shape mine does not.
the reason i bring this up, in a post about a toxic relationship definition, is the shape. a healthy relationship is also a hobby for the wealthy. wealthy in time, wealthy in nervous system, wealthy in the kind of upbringing that makes saying “i’m not okay with this” sound like a sentence and not a confession. the rest of us improvise. we accumulate. we get the shoes we don’t run in. we keep the mug. we let the voicemail fill up. we mute the chat. we call it stability.
i have, technically, no savings account. i have, technically, no green chair. neither of these is an accident.
signs you are inside it (or were)
- you keep objects whose function ended with the relationship.
- you have at least one folder, digital or physical, with the word “evidence” or its quiet cousin.
- you triage incoming calls based on a system whose origins you cannot fully reconstruct.
- you have muted at least one group chat from the relationship’s social ecosystem.
- you avoid one specific room in your apartment, even though the apartment is, technically, a different apartment.
- you find yourself rehearsing arguments at the desk for fights with people who are not in your life anymore.
- you find yourself winning them, briefly, and then noticing the buzzing phone, and not picking up.
if you scored four or more, congratulations. you are not crazy. you are furnished. furnished by a room you no longer live in. some of that furniture is the ordinary debris of a toxic person; some of it is the way narcissism, in its meaner registers, redecorates a household without ever filing a permit. noticing is the entire job.
verdict — the relics, the phone, and the monday
a toxic relationship is not, in the end, an event. it’s a residue. it’s the way the cabinets are organized. it’s the running shoes you don’t run in. it’s the mute on the chat. it’s the voicemail on full. it’s the phone on the desk doing its small buzzing while you, calmly, write a long post in a serif font instead of picking up.
i’m not saying every relationship that ended badly was toxic. that would be a generous read of the english language. i’m saying: if the residue is still here, four years later, in objects you cannot throw out and calls you cannot answer, the room you lived in had walls. the walls are still here. the walls are relics. they are doing their job. (the close cousin of all this is gaslighting and the things my ex insists did not happen; the calm denial there is the same calm denial that stocks these cabinets.)
the job, as far as i can tell from a desk, is to remind you that you survived.
somebody just walked past my screen with a coffee. i tilted the laptop. nothing happened. on this floor, that is neutral news.
i am leaving the phone where it is. i am leaving the mug in the back of the cabinet. the running shoes get one more apartment, possibly two. (peter falk in a 1967 film called luv spends ninety minutes trying to give a wife away on a bridge; somehow the whole thing still lands.) you can call this avoidance. i call it accounting. the relics stay until they don’t.
the phone has stopped, briefly. the mug has stayed where it was. the monday is, by my count, eight minutes shorter than it was when i started.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
writing from a chair the company would not, on inspection, recognize as productivity
P.S. the running shoes are, as of 10:38am, still in the closet. i will not be wearing them today. i will not be wearing them tomorrow. that is, by every working definition, a kind of fidelity.
