The Good Friend Test

Or the one dating hack I wish I knew sooner to keep me out of bad relationships.

There’s a lot of advice floating around on Instagram regarding how to find healthy love. There’s some good lines I’ve written on Post-Its, like, “the moment you wonder if you deserve better, you do.” 

The quotes are generally about the standard you set for behavior you’ll tolerate in relationships. And it is a real struggle to find that Goldilocks zone.

If your standards are too low, you end up being the person giving more in a relationship—sometimes giving so much of yourself to keep your partner there. You make a feast out of breadcrumbs you receive while you yourself give your partner a boulangerie’s worth of effort and love.

If your standards are too high, meanwhile, you end up feeling constantly disappointed. You set a test that no one can pass. Everyone sucks, tout le monde est nul, and no one is good enough for you. 

I tend to see the problem of too low of standards being more prevalent than too high. Especially with the women I meet, their bars get dragged closer to hell because many straight men (in New York, at least) do so little. Women send the first text, plan the next date, because they get tired of waiting for the man to make the effort. 

The woman takes on the majority of the emotional labor out of impatience and frustration because she wants to move the plot. She stops trusting the man to be an equal player in the relationship and takes what she can get with gratitude. Of course, this can be reversed easily too. I don’t want to generalize and say this problem is constrained to any one gender or sexual orientation. But it is a problem. 

The greater point is there’s one thing that having too high or low of standards brings you: The feeling of being very alone, even in relationships. The feeling of imbalance and unfairness.

A lot of the time, we meet strangers and then let them audition for arguably the highest place in our lives: the role of our partner.

Dating is a wild process: You are no one, trying to be someone’s everything. A stranger striving to be “The One.” No one else has to clear that bar so immediately or oftentimes even has access to it.

It is a process of extremes, a zero-sum game, and one guided by feeling, which is such a volatile, fragile, crazy thing.

Feeling can sometimes be so divorced from logic that many people have trouble trusting it. Too many people pack it away in boxes, afraid of its force. But I am someone who basks in emotion. My feelings sit in the open with me. They can just be, and I feel comfortable using my logic to make sense of them. The two forces are friends, in fact. Feeling doesn’t scare me; it is there to help guide me. That’s another blog post though.

Back to this one: In the courting process, we are so sensitive to little offenses and injustices because we are being vulnerable and trusting these people we barely know with parts of ourselves we rarely show anyone. That is an act of courage.

You are doing that while also coping with honeymoon-phase highs and rose-colored lenses. Put bluntly, being around this person physically feels really good. The symphony of a new high as it sets off its flurry of warmth, hope, and ecstasy. So alluring and charming that part of you forgets how dangerous it is.

We are trying to make sense of who is safe, what secure feels like, but it’s all a little hazy. Biology is betraying us, making us lose our heads with all the dopamine surges and feel-good, attachment hormones floating around. You can feel so senseless. The smoke of a new flame gets in your eyes, and nothing looks all that clear.

So how do you set reasonable standards when you yourself are a little emotionally compromised? How do you really see who is good for you? How are you fair to yourself and the people you meet?

I have found at any stage of dating but especially at the beginning, one test that has helped me achieve that balance: I call it the “good friend” test.

Take an action someone does, and ask yourself, “Would a good friend do that to me?” A truly good friend. Or conversely: “Would I do that to a good friend?”

A caveat: This test is only as effective as your definition of good friend is. You have to have a healthy definition of it, one that is fair to them and fair to you. You have to want equally nice things for yourself and others. You need to seek relationships that aren’t one-sided, ones where you both give.

The golden rule, “treat others the way you want to be treated,” is a helpful gauge in this, but in order to employ that rule well, you need to love yourself too.

There’s a lot of self work that leads you to getting a good “good friend” definition. I don’t want to downplay that.

My own definition of “good friend” has changed a lot over the past couple years because I am, by nature, a giver who doesn’t need much back. I remember hitting a breaking point one November night a few years ago though. I was not ok. The city was dark, the cold was hitting my cheek, and I was smiling and trying to stay jovial with a group of friends. I was heartbroken from a breakup, drained from the pile-up of little disappointments I sucked up from many people. But I didn’t want another person’s big day to become about me. I left early because I couldn’t keep my mask up any longer. I’m not sure how much any of them noticed it was slipping. But I felt sick.

I realized, walking back to my apartment, how imbalanced many of my relationships were. I always gave what I wanted in friendship: I cared selflessly for others and went to great lengths to always see them and what they were going through. I put so much in. I wasn’t getting that back oftentimes and realized I need to, on some level. It isn’t enough to just be happy existing in the room.

The problem wasn’t them. It was me, not asking for anything. “I cannot keep putting myself last because no one is ever going to put me first,” I told myself. “I deserve better than what I am giving myself. I am not loving myself enough.”

Over time, I revised and raised my standards. I started finding people who could meet them. When you ask for more, you end up getting more from the right people.

So work your way to a better definition of good friend over time. It’s ok if you’re not there yet. It’s a living, breathing thing, constantly evolving as you do. Mine is still evolving, too.

But let’s say you’ve done some good self work, and your standard for friendship is in a good place.

The advantage of using the good friend test in dating is you don’t have attachment hormones obscuring your view of it. There’s no sexual or romantic component confusing you.

I say 85 percent of a romantic relationship is the emotional support component, which looks basically identical to close friendship. “Boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” “petit(e) ami(e)” en français, those words for significant other literally have “friend” in them. So let’s call it what it is: That part of love is close friendship.

And it is critical to get right. So why would you not judge someone you are dating with the standards you’d use for a good friend? Why give them exceptions you wouldn’t give friends? “It’s ok if she doesn’t ask how I’m feeling because she’s stressed at work this week.” “It’s ok if he makes a joke about my job; he still likes me.” But… what kind of friend doesn’t ask you about you at all? What kind of friend puts you down or belittles your career? What kind of friend, in general, minimizes you? Not a very good one. Maybe not even one at all.

A rule I wish I realized earlier: Do not date people who you would not be friends with otherwise. You can have a functional relationship, but rarely is it as high of quality as one with someone you’d be close to whether or not you were physically attracted to them.

My favorite romantic relationships are ones where I could say my partner was also my best friend. It felt equal to me: a dynamic that I need to feel safe, not taken advantage of, challenged in a healthy way, and respected. 

The good friend test though has helped me evaluate how I want to be treated and has helped me give leniency to people my anxiety may not have naturally given. Example: I am a prompt texter. I text a guy, and he doesn’t respond back as quickly as I would. He must not like me that much, some part of me concludes.

Then I think, ok, would I expect a good friend to text me back immediately? No, I’m way more lax. I would expect them to respond in a timely manner based on their schedule and texting habits, to give me elevated importance, but to also remember their own needs.

You could use a 24-hour rule, but I don’t know if you need to put a number on it. The general point is: Someone can still care a lot about you and not text back fast. They don’t hate you because they take some time to respond or don’t text you non-stop with an unsolicited play-by-play of their life like some dating app matches do. Not a subtweet, it is just wild how normalized constant texting in early dating is and how much insecurity it can generate when there are pattern changes.

Some general other guiding principles: A good friend takes equal responsibility for the upkeep of your relationship. A good friend values how you feel, and you value how they feel. You can sense in tone the good intentions. You can trust they are there throughout every action.

When you disagree, you communicate through it. A good friend gives space when it is asked for, checks in when you are going through it, and vice versa. It is an equal give-and-take dynamic, though the ratio can fluctuate depending on who is going through the harder thing.

A good friend wants your relationship to be healthy and balanced. A good friend cares about how you feel and want to be a positive addition to your life. You feel the same way about them.

Good friends look out for each other, minimize harm, and recognize the independence of each member of the group. There is respect, love, care, consideration, and trust built over time—components that are also necessary in healthy romantic relationships. There is empathy and a good balance between selflessness and self-advocation.

Good friends are hard to find, but are there to stay once you find them.

I’ve met people in their 20s and 30s who have not been in serious relationships yet. This can make them feel insecure. I don’t think they need to be.

For those people who feel inexperienced or lacking, if you know how to be a good close friend, trust me, you have experience doing 85-90 percent of the work of being a great partner. Serial monogamists who jump from partner to partner and ditch their friends in the meantime may know less than you do. Romance and sex are teachable, instinctual things. They are also unique to the person you’re dating; people have different taste, and you adapt to them.

Being a good friend takes far more practice and emotional intelligence sustained over a long period of time. We’ve just been doing it all our lives, so we take it for granted.

Culture focuses on grandiose love stories with high highs and low lows for the drama and intrigue of it all (and the general life milestone narrative). Less attention is paid to slow-burn, stable, long-term friendships that last decades without issue, thanks to both parties’ sustained emotional labor. The crazy love stories make for better entertainment—more clicks and views—because they elicit more extreme reactions. But they are not better, and some aren’t even healthy “aspirational content.”

Relationships, generally speaking, are problem-solving. They are consoling; they are nurturing each person to live up to their full potential. The best versions require a love that is kind, patient, and understanding. They are stable—which is exactly what a healthy romance ends up being, too.

They have that same serenity good, close friendship gives us because they are literally built on it. The friendship component of a romance, my therapist told me, is what makes it last for the long term. It is what anchors it, what gives it wings to really go the distance. It carries it through conflict, beyond the honeymoon phase. It makes love safe and endless.

So the next time you’re questioning the behavior of a match on a dating app or someone you’re going out with, ask yourself: Would a good friend not say thank you? Would a good friend only talk about themselves? Would a good friend gloss over a problem I brought up? Would a good friend be hot and cold with me? Would a good friend make me wonder whether they like me?

You know the answer to these questions. And that, more than any Instagram quote, will tell you when someone isn’t giving you the kindness and relationship you deserve.