When Friendship Reveals Toxic Mindsets

I’ve always been someone who observes people closely. It’s almost natural for me—whenever someone is speaking around me, I tend to notice their choice of words, their tone, and sometimes even the hidden meaning behind what they are saying. Over time, I’ve realized this habit helps me understand people better, and it also teaches me what kind of mindset or mentality I should avoid.

There was this very close friend I had, someone I used to spend a lot of time with. We often had conversations about different things—life, school, relationships, and sometimes just random gist. At first, everything seemed fine, but after a while, I began to notice a disturbing pattern in the way he spoke, especially whenever the topic of women came up.

He had this habit of referring to women in very degrading terms. Sometimes, he would outrightly call them slaves. Other times, he would say things like women are only useful for sex. Initially, I honestly thought he was joking. You know how some people try to sound funny but end up sounding offensive? That’s what I thought it was. But as time went on, I realized it wasn’t a joke at all. It was a consistent way of thinking that he seemed to fully believe in.

Out of curiosity, I tried to understand why he despised women so much. I later discovered that his mindset came from the stories he had heard about women divorcing men and taking away their properties. From his perspective, women were nothing but a source of pain and loss for men. To a small extent, I could understand where his fear was coming from because, yes, stories like that do exist. But the problem was that he allowed those stories to completely shape his view of women, to the point where he saw them as nothing more than a threat.

His bitterness grew so strong that one day, he boldly said he would never get married. Instead, his plan was to simply find a woman, have a child with her, and then pay her off so that she could leave. Hearing him say that left me shocked. It sounded so cold, so transactional—like he was talking about buying an item in the market rather than building a family with another human being.

What worried me most was that even after our friends and I tried to correct him, to explain that not all women were like that, he never changed his mind. He would just double down on his beliefs and repeat those same harsh statements. With time, I came to the conclusion that his thinking was shallow, and honestly, it made me lose a lot of respect for him.

It’s one thing to have fears or doubts about relationships, but when someone starts generalizing and reducing an entire gender to something meaningless, it speaks more about their character than their experiences. That’s the point where I knew I had to keep my distance because some mindsets are just too toxic to allow into your space.

Thanks for reading.