A man mocks his partner in front of their friends. He recounts a mistake that she had confided to him, imitates the way she speaks and makes them laugh. She feels humiliated. On the way home, she explains her pain to him. He minimises it and criticises her for no longer knowing how to laugh.
A few weeks later, the couple receive the same friends. This time, the woman recounts her partner’s professional failure. She chooses the details that make him look ridiculous. When he asks her why she exposed him, she replies: ‘I only did to you what you had done to me.’
Her answer contains a truth. Her action responds to a real humiliation that was poorly acknowledged and never repaired.
But this truth does not turn her own action into respect.
The first behaviour explains the second. It does not cleanse it. Two people have now experienced public shame. Each can tell the story starting at the point that makes them innocent.
Then a word may arrive: toxic.
This word can name a genuinely destructive relationship and help us to stop minimising fear, humiliation, monitoring or retaliation. It can also assign the roles once and for all: on one side, the person who suffers; on the other, the person who causes harm. Every reaction from the first person then seems legitimate because the other has already been condemned.
One responsibility can be much heavier than the other. A relationship can also be dangerous and require safety to be secured first. But no word should exempt us from examining our own actions.
Responsibility within the relationship does not ask us to abandon the word toxic. It asks us not to use it as a certificate of innocence.
A label describes a climate, not its mechanism
Saying that a relationship has become toxic can acknowledge a climate of fear, resentment or humiliation. But this overall description does not yet tell us who does what, at what moment, with what frequency and with what consequences.
It does not distinguish a recurring fault from an occasional reaction, clumsiness from a strategy or a regretted remark from behaviour that is perpetuated.
The word resembles a photograph of a smoke-filled room. It shows that the air has become difficult to breathe. It does not reveal the first source of the fire, the objects that continue to burn or the windows that remain closed.
A label can open our eyes. It becomes dangerous when it closes them again immediately afterwards.
Pinpointing the behaviour offers more protection than reducing a person to an adjective.
‘He interrupted me four times while I was explaining what his decision was costing me.’
‘She revealed something I had told her in confidence in order to ridicule me in front of our loved ones.’
‘We turn every disagreement about money into a trial of the other person’s worth.’
These statements do not soften the facts. They make them observable. They allow us to see whether the problem exists everywhere, in a specific area, during conflicts or since a particular event.
A global identity gives us a person to condemn. A specific behaviour gives us a reality to understand and a decision to make.
Explaining a reaction does not determine its quality
We often confuse two operations: explaining why a reaction appeared and assessing what it produces.
A woman may explain that she shouted because her partner ignored her for several days. A man may explain his infidelity by years of distance. A person may explain a public humiliation by the desire to inflict an old humiliation in return.
The cause reconstructs the path. It does not automatically turn the destination into a good choice.
A humiliating remark does not become respectful because it responds to a humiliation. A betrayal does not become loyal because it follows neglect. Silence intended as punishment does not become healthy communication because the other person was refusing to listen.
We can say in the same breath:
‘I reacted this way to what you did to me.’
‘The way I reacted remains my responsibility.’
The first statement explains. The second gives us back the power to change.
Revenge gives a new permission
Revenge promises symmetry: making the other person experience the pain they imposed on us. We hope that they will finally understand.
But we are then declaring that a behaviour is unacceptable while adopting it as a method. The real message becomes: this action is permitted to the person with the best justification.
The other person in turn receives a reason to respond. The first fault gives rise to a retaliation. The retaliation becomes a new fault, which supplies a new permission.
The relationship no longer seeks what protects it. Each person seeks the earlier episode that makes their behaviour excusable.
A cycle of revenge does not require identical faults. It is enough for each person to regard their own pain as permission and the other person’s as an exaggeration.
We judge our intention and the other person experiences our impact
We know the reasons that precede our actions: tiredness, fear, frustration, efforts already made. Our partner, meanwhile, receives our tone, our absence, our broken promise or the word that will remain in their memory.
The converse is true. We receive their impact and know their inner story less well.
We therefore risk comparing our complete intention with the other person’s visible effect. We are a complex person who has reasons. The other becomes a dangerous person who produces consequences.
To restore a fairer observation, let us assess our impact from the other person’s position. A remark that seems light to us can reawaken weeks of shame in them. A commonplace oversight can confirm an old impression that they do not matter.
The other person’s suffering does not in itself prove that we committed a fault. It nevertheless signals an impact that deserves to be understood before being declared insignificant.
Our good actions do not automatically offset this specific flaw. We can give a great deal of money and speak with contempt. We can be materially present and never protect something told to us in confidence. We can multiply the gestures we like to offer while refusing the one that has been requested for months.
The quantity of our love proves neither its suitability nor its effect.
Updating the image we have of ourselves too
We readily notice that the other person has become less attentive, more irritable or more secretive. We compare the person they are now with the person they were at the beginning.
We are less likely to revise our understanding of ourselves in the same way.
Perhaps we once listened without immediately preparing our defence. Perhaps we have become more demanding and less grateful. Perhaps we have stopped giving thanks, seducing each other or keeping certain promises.
What we were yesterday does not guarantee what we do today.
Revising our understanding of ourselves does not consist in inventing a flaw to balance the list. It means comparing the image we have of ourselves with the behaviours that the other person now encounters.
We cannot ask our partner to change their conduct while demanding that they continue to judge us according to our former version.
Responsibilities can be shared without being equal
Acknowledging a two-person dynamic does not mean dividing every fault into two halves.
One person may lie more, provoke most of the conflicts or go much further in their retaliations. Two forms of participation do not make them equally serious.
We must distinguish three levels.
The specific fault belongs to the person who chooses the action. The person who humiliates is answerable for the humiliation. The person who betrays is answerable for the betrayal.
The dynamic concerns what each person repeats, reinforces, tolerates or uses in response. At this level, two behaviours can feed each other while remaining very unequal.
Future protection concerns what each person can now correct, prepare or stop feeding. It does not change who authored the past. It identifies where our power exists now.
This distinction avoids two injustices: telling the injured person that everything is just as much their fault, or telling them that the other person’s initial fault makes all their responses beyond reproach.
Leaving does not automatically remove our share of the mechanism
A separation can stop a relationship that no longer produces anything good. It can protect our life and end a person’s access to it.
But changing partners does not automatically correct what we were contributing to the dynamic.
If we respond to every frustration with contempt, this reaction remains available for the next relationship. If we keep quiet about our boundaries before exploding, another partner may encounter the same accumulation. If we need a person to be entirely to blame so that we never examine our impact, someone else will eventually receive that role.
We can leave with a true story about the other person’s faults and an incomplete story about ourselves.
Examining our share is not a tribute paid to our former partner. It is an investment in the person we want to become.
Replacing the verdict with an audit
An honest audit does not first ask which of the two is the bad person. It reconstructs the sequence.
It names the initial fact without a global adjective. It clarifies the context, describes the other person’s response, then the response produced in return. It looks at frequency, intensity, apologies, changes and recurrences.
It also examines what is still working. Can a few pleasant moments truly compensate for a central mechanism that has become destructive? Do serious faults coexist with areas that a repair could still protect?
Finally, each person draws up their own list: the behaviours they would not want to receive, the promises they no longer keep and the areas in which their comfort or pride systematically takes precedence over the other person’s world.
This list does not erase our partner’s. It prevents our account from becoming a refuge from all transformation.
The word toxic announces that the air is causing harm. The audit shows how this harm circulates, who produces it, who reinforces it, who tries to stop it and what each person can still decide.
Our share is not a condemnation. It is our lever.
We can lose the pleasure of being beyond reproach and gain the possibility of being different.
The questions that replace the label with facts
- Which specific behaviour am I hiding behind the word toxic?
- Which reaction have I justified solely by its cause?
- Which impact of my actions is my intention preventing me from seeing?
- Which fault belongs to the other person and which response belongs to me?
- Which personal mechanism could I carry into another relationship?
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