Why Saying Yes When You Want to Say No Turns Into Resentment.
My husband was away recently and messaged one morning asking if I was free for a chat because he wanted to share what was going on for him.
On any other morning, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but my son was at his dad’s, I had nowhere I needed to be, and I had been looking forward to one of those rare mornings where I could read in bed with a coffee, meditate, go for a walk and have some time completely to myself.
And so if I’m truthful, I didn’t really feel like talking and giving that up.
That should have been a fairly simple thing to acknowledge, but instead I started getting annoyed that my husband had asked, annoyed with myself for not wanting to talk to him, and telling myself that a good wife should want to be interested and supportive when her husband wanted to share something with her.
Within a few minutes, I had turned a simple request for a phone call into a question about whether I was a good partner.
That moment reminded me of a pattern I’ve noticed in myself for years.
I’ve never been particularly good at asking for what I want. By nature, I’m fairly easy-going and there are plenty of situations where I genuinely don’t mind what we do, where we eat or what the plan is. But there are also times where I do have a preference and I don’t always make it known.
When someone else makes their preference clear, I can very quickly start negotiating with myself. I might not really want to do what they are suggesting, but I can immediately see that they do, and then I start thinking it will probably be easier if I just go along with it. I don’t want them to think I’m difficult or be disappointed, and I can usually find a way to convince myself that maybe what I want doesn’t matter that much anyway.
So I agree, and then I find myself annoyed that I’m doing something I didn’t really want to do, annoyed that I didn’t say what I actually wanted, and sometimes even annoyed with the other person for asking in the first place.
For a long time, I spent a lot of energy wishing the other person would somehow behave differently so that I wouldn’t have to go through that whole internal negotiation. If only they didn’t ask. If only they noticed I wasn’t really into the idea. If only they were a bit more considerate. If only they made it easier for me to say no.
What I eventually started to see was that I was wanting other people to behave differently so I wouldn’t have to experience the discomfort of being honest about what I wanted. I was trying to avoid the possibility that they might be disappointed, think differently of me or not like my answer, but in avoiding a few moments of possible discomfort, I was creating a much bigger pile of discomfort for myself.
That morning with my husband was a good example of exactly that. When I noticed how irritated I was becoming, I did something I often do when I know my reaction feels bigger than the situation itself. I wrote down the facts of what had actually happened.
The fact was very simple: my husband had asked if I was available for a phone call.
That was all I knew to be true.
Then I wrote down everything I was adding to it. My thoughts included: he always makes requests and I never feel like I can say no. He shouldn’t ask because then I feel bad saying no. I hardly ever get mornings like this. I’ve been talking to people all week and I just want some quiet. I want to be a supportive partner, and if I don’t want to take the call, maybe I’m not being a very good wife.
When I looked at everything I had written, I could see how much meaning I had attached to a very ordinary request, and one thought stood out more than the others:
If I don’t take the call, I’m not being a good partner.
That was the thought creating most of the weight, because now this wasn’t simply a question of whether I wanted to take a phone call at that exact moment. I had turned it into something about who I was and the kind of partner I believed I should be.
Sometimes we turn our values into rules
Being a loving and supportive partner matters deeply to me, but somewhere along the way I had taken that value and turned it into a rule that said a good partner should be available when their partner wants them. And those are in fact two very different things.
Being loving doesn’t mean I need to be available every time my husband wants to talk, and being supportive doesn’t mean I can’t have my own preferences or want some time to myself. I can care deeply about him and still not want to talk at that particular moment.
And I think this is something a lot of women do, particularly women who are used to being responsible for other people and being the person who gets things done. We take qualities that matter to us, like being a good mother, a good partner, a reliable colleague, a thoughtful friend or a strong leader, and we attach all sorts of rules to what those qualities are supposed to look like. Such as:
A good mother should want to spend this time with her children.
A good leader shouldn’t let her team down.
A good daughter should say yes.
A good friend should always be there.
A good wife shouldn’t mind.
The rule is often so automatic that we don’t experience it as a rule at all. We experience it as simply what a good person would do.
Once those rules are in place, saying no no longer feels like a simple preference or decision, it starts to feel like evidence that you are failing to be the person you want to be, which is why something as ordinary as a phone call can suddenly feel far more loaded than it needs to. What I realised that morning was that my husband’s request wasn’t really the thing creating all of the tension for me. It was everything I had attached to what saying no might mean about me. And once I could see that, the decision became much simpler.
I could take the call because I genuinely wanted to be there for him at that particular time. Or I could ask to talk later because I wanted to protect that rare morning to myself. Either choice could still be consistent with being a loving and supportive partner.
The important part was that I stopped treating his preference as something I automatically had to accommodate, and I stopped making my own preference mean something negative about me.
This is often where resentment starts to build
What I started to realise was that resentment wasn’t always evidence that someone else was asking too much of me. Sometimes it was evidence that I wasn’t being honest about what I wanted.
I’ve noticed that at times I haven’t actually wanted other people to ask less because their requests were unreasonable. I’ve wanted them to ask less because I didn’t trust myself to respond honestly when they did.
I wanted them to know when I didn’t have capacity, when I would rather do something else, or when I simply didn’t feel like it, without me actually having to make that clear. That way I could become frustrated with them for failing to see something I hadn’t actually communicated. Yes, it’s illogical, I know, but probably more common than we realise.
Of course, there are times when the request itself is unreasonable, or someone repeatedly ignores a boundary you have made clear, and I don’t think every relationship problem can be reduced to how we are thinking about it. But there are also plenty of times where another person has simply told us what they want, and we have immediately treated their preference as something we need to accommodate. That distinction has been an important one for me.
Because there is a very different internal experience between thinking, I would actually prefer to keep this morning to myself, but I’m choosing to take the call because I want to be there for him, and thinking, I have to take the call because he wants me to.
The action might look exactly the same from the outside, but internally it feels very different. In one, I am acknowledging that I have a choice and making it consciously. In the other, I am telling myself that the other person’s preference has taken the choice away from me, which makes it much easier to resent them for something I have ultimately agreed to.
So when I notice myself getting frustrated with someone or wishing they would behave differently, I try to slow the situation down enough to see what is actually going on and do so by asking myself these questions.
What did they actually ask?
What am I telling myself I have to do?
What am I worried it would mean about me if I said no?
And what do I actually want?
That doesn’t mean my preference automatically wins, or that relationships shouldn’t involve compromise. There will be plenty of times where I choose to do something that wouldn’t have been my first choice because someone I care about matters to me. But there is a big difference between choosing something because the other person matters to me and I genuinely want to make that choice in that moment, and doing it because I believe I have no other acceptable option.
It is learning that their preference can exist alongside mine. Other people’s preferences don’t have to disappear for mine to matter, and I don’t have to abandon what I want simply because someone else has made what they want known.
