You're Not Giving Too Much. You're Not Asking.

A woman I saw some years ago ran everything. The school fundraiser. Her mother’s medical appointments. The dinner her husband’s firm held every spring. When a friend’s marriage came apart, she was the one who drove over at eleven at night.

She came to me because she had started crying in her car. Not at anything. Just in the car, between one errand and the next.

I asked her what she wanted from the people she did all this for.

She looked at me as though I had asked the question in another language.

The Advice She Had Already Been Given

Everyone had told her the same thing. You are giving too much. You need boundaries. You need self-care. Learn to say no.

She had tried it. She said no to two things that year and felt so guilty she made up for it by saying yes to four more.

The advice failed because it was aimed at the wrong problem. Nobody who gives like that is going to give less by being told to. Generosity of that kind is not a scheduling error. It is a whole way of being in relation to other people, and you do not dismantle it with a calendar.

The trouble is almost never that you give too much. It is that you have never once said what you wanted back. You have been running a tab that the other person cannot see.

The Unspoken Bill

Here is what I have watched happen for fifty-five years.

A person gives. Genuinely, and often at real cost. And somewhere along the way she begins keeping an account of it. Not deliberately. Nobody decides to start a ledger. But it starts.

The account is private. That is the whole problem. The people on the other side of it have no idea it exists. They are not refusing to pay. They have never been handed the bill.

So she waits. And what she is waiting for is the thing she has never asked for: to be noticed, to be thanked properly, to have somebody drive over at eleven at night for her.

When it does not come, she does not get angry. People built this way rarely do. She gets tired. She gets flat. She starts crying in the car.

What Giving Can Be Hiding

I want to say this carefully, because it is easy to hear as an accusation and I do not mean it as one.

For some people, giving is the safest thing they know how to do. It puts them on solid ground. As long as you are the one carrying the dish to the door, nobody is looking too closely at you, and you never have to do the frightening thing, which is to turn to another adult and say: I need something from you.

Asking is the exposed position. Giving is the covered one.

If you learned early that your needs were an inconvenience, and a great many capable people did learn exactly that, then giving is not only kind. It is also the arrangement in which you are least likely to be turned down.

You cannot be rejected for something you never requested. That safety is real. It is also why you are exhausted.

Why the Resentment Turns Inward

Notice where the anger goes.

It rarely goes to the friend who did not call back. It goes to the giver herself. I am being petty. I should not need this. Other people manage without so much reassurance. What is wrong with me that I keep score.

That is a person who has decided her own wanting is the flaw in the system. And so she does the only thing that has ever worked, which is to give some more, and the account grows, and the tiredness deepens.

I have known people to run this pattern for thirty years and arrive in their sixties genuinely puzzled about why a life of real kindness produced so little that felt like being loved.

What I Actually Ask People to Do

Not to give less. I have never once found that useful, and frankly I do not believe most people can do it.

I ask them to make one request. A small one, out loud, to a specific person, with no apparatus of justification around it.

Not “I have been so busy lately and I know you have too, so no pressure at all, but if you ever have a moment.” That sentence is built to be declined without cost. It is another form of not asking.

Something more like: “I would like you to call me on Sunday.” Or: “I did a great deal for you this year. I would like you to notice.”

The first time, it feels appalling. Every person I have asked to do this reports the same thing, which is that the words come out and then they want to take them back immediately.

Then something happens that they did not predict. Usually the other person says yes. Not always, but usually, and often with some surprise that it needed saying at all.

The Part That Actually Changes Things

The relief does not come from getting the thing. It comes from discovering that you asked and the roof stayed on.

That is the whole treatment, more or less. You have been carrying a belief, formed long before you could examine it, that your wanting is too much for other people. The only way to find out whether that is true is to test it, in small doses, with people who are reasonably safe.

Most of the time it turns out not to be true. Sometimes it turns out to be true of a particular person, and that is worth knowing too, because you have probably been giving a great deal to somebody who was never going to give anything back, and no amount of further giving was going to change that.

Either way you learn something you could not have learned by giving more.

An Invitation

If you recognize yourself here, I would say two things.

The first is that your generosity is not the problem and I would not want you to give it up. It is one of the better things about you and the people around you are lucky to have it.

The second is that generosity without any asking is not a relationship. It is a service you are providing. Services leave people tired and a little bitter, and you deserve better than that from your own life.

If you want to look at how this got set up in you, and at what it would take to say a plain sentence about what you want, that is very much the kind of work I do.