Toxic Relationship: The Signs

About this test

"Toxic relationship" has become a catch-all, used for ordinary conflict and for coercive control alike. This test tries to sort that out differently: it doesn't ask you to label your relationship or judge anyone, it asks you to describe observable behaviour. How much time you spend with the people close to you, who looks at your phone, who decides what you spend, what happens after a crisis, what you do with your own voice before speaking.

That choice isn't incidental. The mechanisms documented by support professionals almost always follow the same shape: gradual isolation that shrinks the number of people you can talk to, repeated disputing of facts until your own memory feels unreliable, control of practical means — phone, money, movement — and a cycle alternating crisis, intense apology and a return of the same behaviour. Any one of these can have a mundane explanation. It's the accumulation that says something.

Two limits, stated plainly. This test makes no diagnosis and will never tell you what the person you're with is: it reflects only your own answers, which is already plenty. And a low score doesn't oblige you to stay somewhere you're unhappy, just as a high score asks no immediate decision of you. The aim is smaller and more useful: to put precise words on what you're living, so that you can talk to someone about it.