It’s a specific kind of frustration because it’s hard to name without sounding jealous or controlling...
You watch your spouse fold for their parents, their friends, their coworkers. People who aren’t even in the room get more of your partner’s consideration than you. They’ll absorb criticism from a sibling without a word, agree to things that cost both of you without consulting you, rearrange your lives to avoid someone else’s discomfort. And when you bring it up, you’re somehow the difficult one.
The deeper injury is what it signals. When your partner won’t hold a boundary with his or her mother, or can’t say no to a friend, it communicates something to you even if it was never said out loud: their need to be liked by others outweighs their relationship with you. The marriage is the place they finally drop the performance. But, instead of that feeling like intimacy, it feels like you’re the receptacle for everything they suppressed everywhere else.
The exhaustion from performing all day comes home with them. The resentment they couldn’t show their family lands on you. And, somehow, when it comes to disappointing you or letting you down, that they have no problem doing.
Their people-pleasing also ends up making you carry weight that isn’t yours. You become the one who has to compensate for their inability to prioritize your relationship or family — either by managing the fallout of their yeses, or by being the bad guy who says the no they couldn’t say.
The most disorienting part is that outside the home everyone thinks your spouse is wonderful. Easygoing, generous, no trouble at all. You know a different reality. And because the problem is invisible to the outsider — no dramatic public incidents, no obvious villain — it’s nearly impossible to explain without sounding like you’re being controlling or punishing someone for being too nice.
How to actually rectify people-pleasing
The first step is to recognize the pattern not as a personality trait but as a strategy. As long as someone experiences their people-pleasing as who they are, there’s nothing to work with. The moment it becomes something they do — something that was learned and is therefore not at the core of their essence — it can be seen as something that’s not inherent and, thus, not permanent.
The next step is deliberate exposure. Not grand assertions of self. Tiny ones. Stating a preference when asked instead of deferring. Keeping a position even when someone pushes back. Saying something true that has a small amount of risk in it. Accumulate experiences in which honesty doesn’t end the relationship.
As we grow in this, we come to contain the discomfort of someone else’s disappointment. This is the most important part because it’s the most liberating part. You come to internalize that the other person’s upset is theirs to carry, not yours to fix.
The end state isn’t someone who never accommodates others. It’s someone who selectively accommodates from choice rather than fear. A person that can say yes and mean it because they can say no without it feeling like it will end their world. Someone who has enough contact with their own interior that they know the difference between what they actually want and what they’ve decided someone else needs them to want.
To free oneself from the self-abandonment of people pleasing is not a personality overhaul. It’s just finally getting to be a person. And, for you and your spouse, that means getting to be married not just on paper.
Comments (0)
Add Comment
Login to join the discussion