Tolerate or End: the Two-Item Menu Friendship Advice Serves

Writing in The Conversation Canada, an author argues that when the language of boundaries gets applied to friendship, it can flatten a complicated relationship into two choices: tolerate the situation or end the friendship.

Before deciding what to do about a "toxic friend," the piece suggests a more basic question — what is a friendship, and what do we expect from it?

That second question is doing more work than it first appears. A friendship can be exhausting in one season and sustaining in another, and the two-option menu has no room for renegotiating terms, lowering expectations or letting a relationship change shape. Staying or leaving is a decision. The prior question is a diagnosis, and it may well point somewhere other than either exit.