Accept limits to one’s abilities

Dear Carolyn: How do you find your limits in being The One Friend I Can Count On? Apparently, I’m that person in my immediate circle of friends. I’m glad they trust me – but in a stroke of remarkably bad luck, the last few months have been a really difficult time for everyone – including me. My father is having serious health issues, and I’m weathering some pretty hefty job stress. One friend just lost a relative to illness, one is stressing about having to find a new place to live and a new job at the same time (and is staying on my couch in the meantime), and another just got married and I am “the only person” she can call when they fight (which is frequently) or when she has doubts (which is basically whenever they fight). Ordinarily I would go out of my way to help, but this is becoming too much. How can I begin to limit their dependence on me until I have more ability to help? – Washington

I think you’ll feel better if you change “dependence on” to “appreciation of.”

Starting with your dependence on being depended upon. Be glad your friends trust you, absolutely, but be careful not to become so invested in your role that you let “you are the only person I can call when we fight” stand unchallenged. It happens once, you say thanks. It happens every fight, you explain – to yourself and to your friend – that there are limits to what you can do. Which you’ve clearly reached since they are still fighting all the time. Use that last part at your discretion.

Point being, more available doesn’t necessarily translate to more helpful.

And the larger point being: While you and your friends all have big things going on, it sounds like you’re so attuned to and defined by crisis, so validated by it, that your threshold for it is down around your knees. You feel better for rescuing people, a lot of people do, but you’re starting to lose yourself to your own heroics. Maybe it’s time to trust people to like who you are, and not just what you’ve done for them lately.

To that end, try resetting your crisis threshold so that everyone’s situation is a more or less difficult version of business as usual. Couples fight. Friends crash on couches. Relatives die. And friends just do what they can.

Dear Carolyn: My mostly wonderful boyfriend has a few habits that irk me, i.e. being late all the time. However, I happen to share many of these habits – i.e. being late all the time – so I feel as though I can’t express my frustration when he’s late to the airport because I just did it to him last week. Any thoughts? – Va.

Yes. Stop being late all the time. Once you’ve kicked that and any other bad habits you resent in other people, you’ll have the insight, not to mention standing, to ask it of other people.