3 signs of a healthy friendship, even if they're really annoying you right now

• Feeling irritated by a friend doesn't necessarily mean the relationship is unhealthy.
• Irritation can be both about what someone is doing and how we're perceiving it.

If you're finding a friend particularly annoying right now, it doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with your relationship. In fact, it might be a sign that it's perfectly healthy.

Friendships in the US feel precarious at the moment. Despite young people having fewer friends than ever and living through a loneliness epidemic, friendship breakups are a hot topic.

People are dropping "text bombs," or long messages airing grievances on unsuspecting friends. They include "therapy speak" terms such as boundaries, emotional labor, and gaslighting, and can lead to relationships ending over seemingly innocuous things, such as taking a while to respond to a text.

But feeling irritated with someone you're close to is a very common experience, Dee Holmes, a relationship counselor and clinical services manager at Relate, a UK-based relationship support charity, told Business Insider.

And it can mean different things to different people. "Irritation is sort of a bit twofold, isn't it? It's a bit about what the person might be doing, but it's also about how the person's receiving it," she said.

So before you decide your friendship is "toxic," or you need to set some new "boundaries," Holmes shared three signs that your friendship is healthy, even if your friend is getting on your nerves.

Healthy disagreement is a sign of a strong foundation

If you have a friendship where you get annoyed at each other but you're able to express it, that's actually quite a healthy dynamic, Holmes said: "By human nature, we're going to irritate each other because nobody's perfect."

Feeling irritated, expressing it to the other person, and even being able to take some distance and come back together is a sign of a strong foundation, she said.

Particularly if, on the whole, you look forward to seeing that person and have shared interests and common goals, being able to lightheartedly pull each other up on things that annoy you can be a good thing, she said.

Irritation can be a reflection of how you're feeling generally

If you're getting easily annoyed by someone, it might be because of the way you're feeling more generally, Holmes said.

It's easy to get irritated at small things if you've had a long day at work or have a family to look after and need some downtime, but have too much going on.

"I think often we feel irritated if we're thwarted, if we're not able to perhaps meet our needs," she said. But that really doesn't say anything about our relationships with others.

You feel emotionally secure within the friendship

Similarly, when you feel emotionally safe with someone and secure within the relationship, you might be more likely to snap at them if you're feeling stressed about something else. This is a common dynamic in romantic or familial relationships, Holmes said.

You feel confident that the relationship won't come to an end if you're acting less-than-perfectly, so frustrations from spaces such as work, where you need to be professional, can be transferred onto a safer environment.

It's unfair to allow this to happen all the time, but if you're able to recognize it's happening, apologize to your friend, and work on it, it shows that you feel safe with them, Holmes said.