Who actually asks this question
Start here, because it changes how to read any result: people who treat others badly and feel fine about it very rarely go looking for a quiz called "am I the toxic friend". Anxious, conscientious people search it constantly, often about a relationship where somebody else has been telling them they are the problem.
Which means a self-report instrument on this subject is systematically wrong in one direction. A high score from a worried person is more likely to be harsh self-assessment than accurate measurement. A low score from someone genuinely careless is exactly what you would predict. Hold the result loosely in both directions.
Two things worth measuring separately
"Toxic" is a single word doing at least two jobs, and the repair is different depending on which one applies.
How much room you take. Whose topics the conversation runs on, whose schedule the plans fit, whether you get in touch mostly when you need something, whether you could say right now what is hard in your closest friends' lives.
What your reactions cost. Whether people can disagree with you cheaply, what the atmosphere is like after a disagreement, whether you withdraw in a way that is felt rather than said, whether you land precise hits in an argument.
Someone can be quite self-absorbed and completely safe to be honest with. Someone else can be scrupulously fair about airtime and still expensive to upset. The second is the more damaging pattern and the one people are least likely to notice about themselves.
Why the cost side matters more
There is a specific mechanism worth understanding. When being honest with someone is expensive, people stop being honest with them — and the friendship does not become difficult, it becomes quieter. From the inside that reads as things being fine.
So the cost pattern is self-concealing in a way the airtime pattern is not. A friend can tell you that you talk about yourself too much. A friend cannot easily tell you that telling you things is unpleasant, because doing so requires exactly the honesty that has become expensive. If both meters are high, the cost side is where to start — not because it is worse, but because fixing it restores the feedback you would need to fix anything else.
The three moves that do most of the work
- Ask one follow-up question, unprompted. About something they mentioned last time. This demonstrates retention, and retention is what people actually experience as being cared about.
- State the withdrawal instead of performing it. "I'm upset and I need an hour" costs the other person nothing to read. Silence that has to be interpreted costs them the whole evening.
- Repair on the how, separately from the what. A short, specific acknowledgement of how you argued — not whether you were right — is the thing that resets the cost of disagreeing with you.
When the question is coming from outside
One case deserves separating out. If you are here because someone repeatedly tells you that you are the problem whenever you raise anything — that every complaint is evidence of your unreasonableness — that is a different situation, and this quiz is the wrong instrument for it. Our relationship safety check and toxic friendship check ask the more useful questions there.
And if the answer turns out to be a genuine and broad pattern rather than one relationship, that is good material for a therapist. Not as an accusation — simply because this kind of change goes considerably faster with someone else in the room. In the meantime, a large share of what reads as being a good friend is having remembered: the thing they mentioned, the week they were dreading. Endearist handles that part on your own device, no account, no feed.