Boundaries, Reciprocity, and the Cost of Always Saying Yes
In my recent reading and writing about community, reciprocity, and mattering, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the benefits of helping other people. There is some fascinating research suggesting that giving support can benefit the giver as well as the recipient, and that having opportunities to contribute may be an important part of our wellbeing.
But there is an obvious problem with telling everyone that helping other people is good for them.
Sometimes helping feels terrible.
Most of us have probably had at least one person in our lives who always seems to need something. They need a ride, a favor, help with a project, someone to listen, someone to lend them money, someone to solve a problem, or someone to rearrange their schedule. They may be perfectly capable of giving something back, but somehow the relationship rarely seems to work in that direction.
We sometimes call these people “takers.” I'm a little hesitant to label a whole person that way because we don't necessarily know why someone behaves as they do. Some people have poor awareness of how much they're asking. Some become accustomed to another person's generosity. Some relationships simply develop a pattern where one person asks and the other person reliably says yes.
Whatever the reason, though, the effect can be the same: one person keeps giving, and eventually they begin to feel depleted, irritated, or resentful.
That doesn't sound much like the health benefits of helping others that we've been talking about. So what changes?
Reciprocity Doesn't Mean Keeping Score
Healthy reciprocity doesn't require every relationship to remain perfectly balanced. Sometimes a friend needs much more from us than they can possibly give back. People become sick. They lose jobs. Parents die. Marriages end. Babies are born. Disabilities and injuries change what people can do. Mental health struggles happen. There are seasons of life when someone we love simply needs us more.
Hopefully, over the course of a long relationship, the balance shifts. I've carried you through something, and years later you may carry me. That's very different from a relationship in which the imbalance is the relationship.
Research into social support actually makes this distinction interesting. A 23-year longitudinal study of more than 6,000 American adults found that people whose giving and receiving of practical support were relatively balanced had lower all-cause mortality risk than people who disproportionately received support or disproportionately gave it. The authors are careful to describe these findings as correlational, but their results don't support the simplistic idea that the more we give, the better off we necessarily are.
Another study examining friendships, family relationships, and marriages found that people who perceived themselves as under-benefiting - giving more support than they received - tended to report poorer psychological wellbeing than people in balanced relationships. Under-benefiting was associated with more stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms and less positive affect. In friendships and family relationships, under-benefiting generally appeared more distressing than being the person receiving more than they gave.
So perhaps the question isn't simply whether helping is good for us. Maybe it matters whether helping exists within a relationship where our needs count too.
Resentment Can Be Information
I think resentment gets treated as an emotion we're supposed to be ashamed of. We tell ourselves they're going through a lot, they need us, it isn't that difficult, we have the ability to help, or it would be selfish to say no.
Maybe. But resentment can also be useful information. It may be telling us that we've agreed to something we didn't actually want to do. Or that something we happily agreed to once has quietly become an expectation. Or that the amount being asked of us has begun to exceed the time, energy, money, or emotional capacity we actually have available.
That doesn't necessarily make the other person a villain. It also doesn't mean we have to wait until they become one before we're allowed to change something.
A boundary doesn't require a villain.
We don't have to build a court case proving that someone is selfish enough to deserve our no. Sometimes a situation simply isn't sustainable anymore.
Being Able to Help Isn't the Same as Having the Capacity to Help
You can have a car and still not have time to drive someone somewhere. You can have a guest room and not have the capacity to host someone. You can know how to repair something without becoming everyone's free handyman. You can be good at listening without being available for a two-hour phone call every time someone is upset. You can have money in your bank account without being willing to lend it.
And you can love someone very much while recognizing that what they're asking from you is more than you're willing or able to give.
Sometimes we look at our resources and think, Well, technically I could do it. But the fact that something is physically possible doesn't mean it has no cost. Your time has a cost. Your attention has a cost. Rearranging your day has a cost. Emotional labor has a cost. Gasoline has a very literal cost.
When one person repeatedly asks and another repeatedly absorbs those costs, a favor can slowly become an obligation.
Sometimes You Need to Put a Paywall on Being the Good Neighbor
A friend recently told me about exactly this kind of situation. Someone in her life regularly needed transportation and other practical help. My friend was willing to help and genuinely cared about the person's needs, but the requests had become frequent. At the same time, my friend was going through an especially difficult and busy period in her own life. She already had more to accomplish each day than she realistically had time for, and continuing to provide transportation whenever it was requested was becoming frustrating and exhausting.
She thought about what was actually bothering her. She didn't necessarily want to stop helping. She just couldn't keep providing an unlimited amount of her time for free.
So she changed the arrangement. She offered to continue providing transportation, but she would charge an hourly rate for her time. She deliberately chose an amount below what comparable commercial transportation would cost because the goal wasn't to profit from the situation or take advantage of anyone. The goal was to put a value on time that had previously been treated as freely available.
The other person thought about it and ultimately agreed. So far, the arrangement seems to be working.
I find this example fascinating because the boundary wasn't “I refuse to help you.” It was “These are the conditions under which I can continue helping you.”
A Paywall Can Make an Invisible Cost Visible
Money makes people uncomfortable when friendship and helping are involved. I understand why. We don't want every human interaction to become transactional. In fact, I've just spent an entire article arguing that one of the problems with modern life is that there is now a paywall on many things that once fell under the category of being a good neighbor.
But sometimes the reverse is also true. Sometimes you need to put a paywall on being the good neighbor.
Imagine that someone routinely asks you for rides. As long as the rides are free, the person making the request experiences primarily their own need: I need to get somewhere. The driver absorbs the rest of the cost: time, gasoline, mileage, interruption, scheduling, and whatever they aren't doing while they're driving.
Introduce a reasonable price and suddenly some of that invisible cost becomes visible. The question changes from “Will you help me?” to something closer to “Is this trip important enough to me that I'm willing to compensate you for the time it requires?” Sometimes the answer will be no. And sometimes, as in my friend's situation, the answer will be yes. Either outcome provides useful information.
Boundaries Give Us More Options Than Yes or Goodbye
I also think we need to push back against the idea that every difficult relationship requires us to “cut toxic people out of our lives.” Sometimes ending a relationship is absolutely appropriate. But sometimes the person who frustrates us is our parent, sibling, adult child, neighbor, coworker, longtime friend, or someone deeply embedded in a community we share. Maybe we don't want to end the relationship. Maybe the person has many qualities we love alongside one particularly exhausting pattern.
Boundaries give us a lot of territory between unlimited availability and total estrangement.
A boundary can be: I can drive you once a week, but I can't do additional trips. It can be: I'm happy to help, but I need a few days' notice. It can be: I can't lend you money anymore. It can be: I don't have the capacity for this conversation tonight. It can be: I can do that, but I'll need to charge for my time. Or sometimes it can simply be: I can't help with that.
The boundary isn't really about controlling what the other person does. They can continue asking. They can be disappointed. They can decide they don't like our new terms. The boundary is about deciding what we will do when they ask.
The Hard Part May Be Letting Someone Be Disappointed
I suspect this is where many boundaries collapse. We explain the boundary. The other person becomes annoyed, hurt, surprised, or inconvenienced. Then we immediately begin negotiating against ourselves: maybe I can squeeze it in, maybe just this once, maybe I'm being selfish.
But if the only boundary we're willing to maintain is one the other person enthusiastically approves of, it isn't much of a boundary.
Research on social support imbalance also points to a complication that feels very true to real life: some relationships are easier to leave than others. Researchers have suggested that imbalance in family and spousal relationships may be especially difficult because people often don't perceive themselves as free to simply end those relationships.
Sometimes cutting someone out isn't possible. Sometimes it isn't desirable. Sometimes what we actually need is to change our participation in the pattern.
Boundaries Can Protect Generosity
I don't want the conclusion from any of this to be that we should stop helping people unless they can immediately repay us. That would destroy the entire idea of community.
Reciprocity isn't an invoice. Healthy relationships go through periods of enormous imbalance, and generosity often means giving without knowing exactly how or when something will come back to us.
But there is a difference between a relationship going through a season of imbalance and a relationship being built around one.
If helping someone repeatedly leaves us resentful, depleted, financially strained, chronically inconvenienced, or unable to attend to our own responsibilities, perhaps the answer isn't necessarily to stop caring. Maybe we need to change the conditions under which we give.
Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes it's not today. Sometimes it's once a week. Sometimes it's, “I love you, but I can't keep doing this for you.” And apparently, sometimes it's $20 an hour plus gas.
If that's what turns an unsustainable favor into an arrangement that both people can willingly agree to, perhaps the paywall isn't the end of community after all.
Maybe it's what allows generosity - and reciprocity - to survive.
Sources & Further Reading
Chen, E., Lam, P. H., Finegood, E. D., Turiano, N. A., Mroczek, D. K., & Miller, G. E. (2021). “The Balance of Giving Versus Receiving Social Support and All-Cause Mortality in a US National Sample.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(24).
A 23-year longitudinal study of 6,325 U.S. adults examining the balance of instrumental support given and received and mortality risk. The authors emphasize that the findings are correlational.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8214686/
Wang, D., & Gruenewald, T. (2019). “The Psychological Costs of Social Support Imbalance: Variation Across Relationship Context and Age.” Journal of Health Psychology, 24(12), 1615–1625.
Examined support exchanges within friendships, families, and marriages. Under-benefiting was associated with poorer psychological wellbeing, including higher stress, anxiety, and depression and lower positive affect.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7008943/
Gleason, M. E. J., Iida, M., Bolger, N., & Shrout, P. E. (2003). “Daily Supportive Equity in Close Relationships.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(8), 1036–1045.
A daily study of couples examining reciprocal support exchanges and mood.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15189621/
Gleason, M. E. J., et al. “Receiving Support as a Mixed Blessing: Evidence for Dual Effects of Support on Psychological Outcomes.”
Discusses how receiving social support can have beneficial and psychologically complicated effects, including concerns related to inequity and reciprocity.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3898885/
Jou, Y. H., & Fukada, H. (1996). “The Effects of Social Support Reciprocity on Mental and Physical Health of Young Adults.” Japanese Journal of Psychology, 67(1), 33–41.
Examined reciprocity, negative affect, and health among young adults.