A boogeyman haunts the realm of friendship advice: the friend who vents too much. Although people have surely been complaining since the dawn of language, and getting annoyed at one another about it for nearly as long, venting about how much other people are venting has lately gotten very loud. Etiquette books, advice columns, and talking-head TikToks have taken up the issue of over-venting. Complaining too much sometimes gets framed as not just irritating but “toxic,” and sharing problems is sometimes described as “trauma dumping.” Those on the receiving end of complaints bemoan their status as the “therapist friend.” The message is: Vent with caution. Therapists and researchers I spoke with have also noticed a heightened anxiety among their patients and research subjects about venting. “It’s a real-life thing,” Peter Mallory, a sociologist at St. Francis Xavier University, told me. He said that when he interviews people about their friendships, he frequently hears them “talking about the burdens of other people coming to them when they need emotional support.” In turn, some people seem to be holding back from their friends for fear of burdening them. Blake Blankenbecler, a therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that she hears both sentiments from her clients: “I don’t want to be too much and My friend is too much right now.” Some conflict within friendships over venting seems inevitable. Venting is complex; it can bring people closer, but it can also be emotionally draining. The impulse to conceal struggles from friends, or to resist listening to a friend’s complaints, however, is misguided: If people avoid sharing problems with one another, their relationships risk becoming less rich—and less rewarding. The idea of venting was popularized by Sigmund Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer, who believed that catharsis of suppressed emotions was key to treating hysteria and neurosis. Freud wrote of “giving vent to the torments of the secret.” Anger was not the only emotion he thought needed release, but the idea of venting your frustration lest you explode has had real staying power. It still fuels a lot of conventional wisdom about how to deal with negative emotions, including tips to scream into a pillow, “let it out,” or “get something off your chest.” (And this concept of catharsis informed much of what we know as talk therapy today.) Research, however, has shown that venting does not reduce anger but can actually fuel it—which may be why some people go so far as to say that you should never vent at all, to anyone. The self-help author and podcaster Mel Robbins has called venting a “trap” and instead recommends her “Let Them Theory,” which, as I understand it, advises people to just accept however others are acting and try not to be upset about it. Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, advocated against venting for other reasons: “Complaining is how weak people try to connect,” he said in a social-media video last year. [Read: That’s it. You’re dead to me.] Still, venting can make people feel better, even if it doesn’t make them less enraged, because it has a social purpose. “We vent to connect, feel validated, etc and maybe even more energized to deal with the conflict,” Jennifer Parlamis, a social psychologist at the University of San Francisco, told me in an email. “You feel better because you received social support but you are not less angry.” That support from another person can make the difference between a successful vent session and a dud. In one study, Parlamis found that whether venters came away from an interaction with their moods improved depended on how the listener responded. Venting can also bring people closer, much like sharing secrets can build intimacy. One way this happens, according to research by Jaimie Arona Krems, a social psychologist at UCLA, is when one friend vents to another about someone else. This kind of venting makes the listener likely to prefer the venter over the person being vented about. So it’s a way of solidifying a relationship, if a somewhat-manipulative way. Despite the social benefits of venting, people can easily overdo it. Online, people frequently complain about friends’ constant negativity bringing them down. They aren’t wrong to worry about this; emotions are contagious. Complaining can lead to what is called “co-rumination,” or excessive dwelling on a problem in discussion—you can get caught up in a friend’s thought spiral and their emotions. Co-rumination is linked to depressive symptoms but also to higher-quality friendships, presumably because co-ruminators have people they trust to discuss problems with them. An interviewee in one of Mallory’s studies summed up the tension between the advantages and drawbacks of venting. At one point, she talked about the importance of friends sharing issues and giving one another advice: “For me, friendship means counseling,” she said. But later, she also said that she felt emotionally burned-out by paying attention to friends’ problems. Contradictorily, she saw “counseling her friends as both intimacy-building and a risk to her own wellbeing,” the researchers wrote. Anti-venting partisans have some ideas for what people should do instead of complaining to their friends: journaling—or better yet, if you can afford it, going to therapy and paying someone to listen. (Reminders that “friends are not your therapists” abound on social media.) For those who do choose to vent to a friend, advice-givers suggest scheduling a time to talk about a tricky topic, so your friend isn’t blindsided; setting a timer for how long you’re going to complain; or—and this one comes up again and again—asking your friend for permission to vent before doing so. This guidance implies that minimizing venting is almost a matter of etiquette, that asking for too much of others’ emotional energy is impolite. The advice also urges friends to behave in ways that are oddly formal. As Mallory pointed out, planning time to complain to a friend sounds “almost like booking an appointment with your therapist”—ironic, considering the imperative to not treat friends like therapists. These tips also focus on controlling and containing the mess of emotions that can come along with venting; yet the nature of both emotions and relationships is messy and unpredictable. “The most sustainable friendships,” Blankenbecler said, “value and create space for there to be some friction from time to time.” [Read: A wedding reveals how much help is available to you] And confining all of your venting to a journal or a therapist’s office could come at a real cost to relationships. If you never complain to your friends, Danielle Bayard Jackson, a friendship coach and the author of Fighting for Our Friendships, told me, you lose opportunities to signal trust, get “perspective from a person who knows and loves you,” and build intimacy. Jackson said that after she started going to therapy, she did ask for less from her friends. “It directly changed how I approached my friends,” she said. Her reach-outs for emotional support became “less frequent and intense.” She said that both therapy and prayer offered her help that her friends couldn’t. Still, Jackson didn’t stop complaining to her friends entirely. “Taking it totally off the table,” she said, “just feels kind of antithetical to friendship itself.” That is what the venting debate is really about: friendship itself, and how friends should be. Should friendship be a haven from mess, or a safe space for it? Should friends support or avoid burdening one another? And, as Jackson put it, “what do you believe your friends owe you?” I don’t believe that friends owe one another unlimited time or energy. But they do owe one another, at least, compassion, reciprocity, and the generosity to not assume that a friend’s problems are only burdens.