When your lover(Or friend) uses their difficult emotions to coerce you into behaving in a particular way – so that they will not feel bad.. you are creating a very unhealthy precedent in your relationship.

Because (assuming that you’re a fairly conscious and empathetic person) the moment you start bending backwards to accommodate their fragility you are CONDONING their role as victims.

Here’s the problem:

When you sacrifice yourself in order to maintain a relationship you are bound to ALWAYS lose both.

Every time you say yes when you meant to say no, because “it’ll hurt them” what you are saying is:

“They are not mature/aware enough to handle their own emotions, therefore I should do it for them.”

It puts you in a place where you’ll brew resentment and where they won’t have to deal with or face their own dysfunctions.

You keep them enslaved in the victim’s role, believing that when THEY hurt within it is the world that needs changing.

And let me tell you something:

For a person who hasn’t resolved to owning their inner world, no amount of external fixing will bring about lasting peace.

If someone’s finger is broken, everything they touch will hurt them – no matter how much you accommodate things around them.

If someone is tripping and falling because they are not paying attention where they walk, they may demand that you remove all obstacles..

And if you do so, sure.. they may not trip over those stones anymore.. but they’ll most likely end up walking off a precipice.

Because what needed to be changed was not the stones on the road but the awareness of the person walking!

This is difficult in relationship where you want the other to be happy and therefore attempt to accommodate and compromise so that it’s easier…

However, your relationship is better served by making someone competent than by making them comfortable.

And competence demands, first and foremost, that they own up their own pain and that -instead of pointing fingers and demanding that others’ solve it for them- they become accountable, responsible and proactive about being resilient and sovereign enough over their own experience.

Never again holding you or anyone else responsible for that which they feel inside, and giving themselves a chance to consider that.. Maaaybe… Their life is actually in THEIR hands.

And what they craft out of it is 100% up to them.

Love is empowering, never condoning or spoiling.

Love invites the other to recognize their own power and their own freedom.

Love does not succumb to anyone’s petty little limitations.

Love is ultimate responsibility.

Anything less than that is a disservice to yourself..

To him/her.

And to the relationship.