By Lillian Okenwa
There are people who seem to have an endless supply of themselves.
They are the ones family members call when there is a problem, the friends who are expected to come through, the parents who somehow find money when there is none, the siblings who step in when everyone else has run out of options. Someone needs a favour, a loan, a ride, a place to stay, an introduction, a listening ear or one more thing done, and they find themselves saying yes before they have considered what it will cost.
For a long time, it may not bother them.
Helping people they love can feel natural. They may not even think of what they do as sacrifice. They are simply doing what needs to be done.
Then, gradually, something changes.
The things that once drew a grateful “thank you” become part of the normal arrangement. The extra money becomes money they are expected to find. The favour becomes their responsibility. The time they freely offered becomes time other people feel entitled to. They help nine times and, on the tenth, when they cannot, the conversation is about the one time they failed to show up.
It can leave a person bewildered.
How did everything I have done become so easy to forget?
Perhaps the more difficult question is how the arrangement came to be in the first place.
We often think of boundaries as something other people violate, and sometimes they do. There are people who take advantage of generosity. There are people who know exactly how much they can ask and from whom they can ask it. There are also relationships in which nobody set out to exploit anyone. One person simply kept saying yes, while the other kept getting used to hearing it.
That difference does not make the outcome any less painful.
Human beings learn from repetition. When someone has always been available, their availability begins to feel normal. When someone has always rescued us, we may stop preparing for the possibility that they will not. When a person repeatedly puts our needs ahead of their own, we may begin to assume that our needs should come first.
The giver may not have intended to teach this lesson. But it can still be learned.
Consider a mother who has spent years helping an adult child through one financial difficulty after another. She cuts back on things she would have bought for herself, takes from savings, postpones her own plans and keeps finding a way to help. Perhaps the child is genuinely grateful each time. But years later, another crisis arrives and the mother says she cannot help.
Read Also: Echoes of Trauma: The trauma of being the strong one
Read Also: He paid for the house. She built the home: Kaduna court redraws the rules of matrimonial property
The response is not gratitude for all the times she did. It is disappointment that she will not do it again.
“But you always help me.”
The sadness in that sentence goes beyond the immediate disagreement. It tells us that years of extraordinary effort have gradually become ordinary.
The same thing can happen between siblings. One becomes the family problem-solver and remains in that role long after everyone has grown older. The younger ones call whenever something goes wrong. Bills, emergencies, school fees, family disputes, difficult decisions — somehow, the call always comes to the same person.
Sometimes that person is proud of being dependable.
Sometimes they are exhausted.
Often, they are both.
Friendships can develop the same imbalance. There is the friend who always lends money, always drives, always listens, always makes the plans, always forgives. Nobody may have sat down and decided that this friend would carry more than everyone else. It simply happened through years of accommodation.
Until the day that friend needs something.
And discovers that the people they have spent years helping may not know how to help them.
That realisation can hurt more than the original requests ever did.
It can also produce resentment, and resentment is where the person who has always given may need to be honest with themselves.
Not every resentment means someone has wronged us. Sometimes it is telling us that we have been agreeing to things we no longer want to do.
There is a difference between freely giving and giving while secretly hoping that the other person will notice how much it is costing.
The second kind of giving eventually becomes heavy.
A person may begin keeping an invisible record: The money they gave, the calls they answered, the plans they cancelled, the opportunities they missed, the times they came through when nobody else did.
They may never say any of it aloud.
But they remember.
And when the other person makes another demand, all those memories come rushing back.
After everything I have done for you.
It is an understandable thought. It is also a warning that something has gone wrong.
We cannot give someone a gift and then demand that they understand its value exactly as we do. Nor can we make another person grateful by giving more. There are people who will never notice what we sacrifice for them, no matter how much we sacrifice.
At some point, giving more will not solve the problem.
It may make it worse.
This is where the person who keeps bending has to look at their own part in the pattern. Not to take responsibility for another person’s entitlement, but to ask why they have continued long after the arrangement stopped being sustainable.
Perhaps they were afraid of disappointing someone.
Perhaps they were raised to believe that saying no was rude or selfish.
Perhaps they found it easier to help than to deal with someone’s anger when they refused.
Perhaps being the dependable one had become part of their identity.
Or perhaps they simply loved the people involved and could not bear to watch them struggle.
There is compassion in understanding that. But there must also be room for another truth: Love does not require us to become endlessly available.
Sometimes the person who keeps saying yes is not only helping someone else. They are also avoiding something in themselves — the discomfort of disappointing someone, the guilt that comes with refusing a request, the fear that the relationship might change if they stop providing what the other person needs.
So, they keep saying yes; until they cannot.
The first no can be surprisingly difficult.
It may be something as simple as, “I can’t do that this time.”
Yet for someone who has spent years saying yes, those words can feel enormous.
The other person may be confused.
“But you’ve always done it.”
And there it is.
The old expectation has been exposed.
The person who has always accommodated everyone has changed the terms. What they once did willingly is no longer something they are prepared to do every time. The other person may experience that as rejection, even though the giver may simply have reached the point where continuing would come at too high a cost.
This is often when guilt appears.
The giver sees the disappointment on the other person’s face and begins to doubt themselves. They wonder whether they are being selfish. They consider giving in just this once.
And sometimes they do.
The immediate discomfort disappears.
The pattern survives.
There is nothing wrong with saying yes to people we love. In fact, some of the most meaningful acts of love involve inconvenience. Parents make sacrifices for their children. Friends show up when it is difficult. Siblings carry one another through hard seasons. Spouses adjust for each other.
The problem is not generosity.
The problem is when generosity ceases to be a choice.
A yes that is freely given means something. A yes given out of fear, guilt or the certainty that there will be consequences for saying no is something else.
And perhaps that is one of the hidden costs of never saying no: Eventually, even we may stop knowing whether our yes means “I want to help” or “I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t.”
There is another cost too.
When we constantly put ourselves last, our own lives can become strangely unfamiliar. We know what everyone else needs. We know who is struggling, who needs money, who needs advice, who needs a favour, who needs us to step in.
But what do we need?
That question can become surprisingly difficult to answer.
Years of accommodation can make self-denial feel like virtue. We may even become uncomfortable when someone offers to help us. We are so accustomed to being the one who carries things that receiving can feel unnatural.
Yet relationships are not meant to be built around one person continually giving and another continually receiving.
At some point, something has to be allowed to change.
That may mean letting an adult child solve a problem without rescuing them. It may mean allowing a sibling to make arrangements without automatically stepping in. It may mean telling a friend that you cannot lend money. It may mean refusing an invitation when you are tired instead of inventing an excuse for why you cannot attend.
It may even mean disappointing someone.
That is one of the things we rarely want to admit about saying no. Sometimes, someone will be disappointed.
We cannot make our boundaries painless for everyone else.
But disappointment is not necessarily harm, and another person’s displeasure is not proof that we have done something wrong.
The person who has always bent may eventually discover that they have been waiting for someone else to give them permission to stop.
No one may come.
Sometimes we have to give ourselves that permission.
Not because the people we have helped do not matter, but because we matter too.
And maybe there is a lesson here for both sides of the relationship. If someone has always been generous with us, we should not confuse their generosity with an unlimited supply. We should notice the effort, ask whether they are all right, offer to carry something when we can and understand that their circumstances may change.
And if we are the ones who keep giving, perhaps we should stop waiting for resentment to tell us where our limits are.
We can say no before we become angry.
We can ask for help before we become exhausted.
We can allow someone else to carry a responsibility we have always carried.
We can give without keeping score, but we can also stop giving when the giving is destroying something in us.
Sometimes, never saying no does more than leave us tired. It can teach people that our time is always available, our resources are always accessible and our limits are negotiable.
Then one day, we say no, and everyone wonders what happened to us.
Perhaps nothing happened.
Perhaps we simply stopped bending.
And perhaps the hardest no to say is the one that comes after years of teaching everyone around us to expect a yes.
A lawyer and equity advocate, Lillian can be reached at [email protected]. X: @OkenwaLillian.
