What we’re really doing when we say “I’m here.”
When you’re providing what you don’t have because you need them to be okay so that you can be okay, that’s problematic.
You’re comforting your partner through a crisis, and you believe you’re being selfless. But what if there’s a second reason you’re doing it, one you’ve never consciously acknowledged?
There’s a pattern in relationships that we rarely talk about directly. Your partner is upset. You comfort them, listening patiently, offering reassurance, helping them through whatever difficulty they’re facing. Later, when you’re struggling, they’re there for you in return. This seems like straightforward reciprocity, the healthy give-and-take of caring relationships.
But sometimes there’s an additional, less conscious dynamic at play. You comfort them in their difficulty partly so they’ll be stable enough to comfort you in yours. You shore them up so they can shore you up. You’re investing in their emotional capacity because you know you’ll need to draw on it later.
This isn’t manipulation or calculation in the negative sense. It’s a subtle form of enlightened self-interest woven into genuine care, and recognizing it can help you understand both the beauty and the fragility of how we actually support each other.
We like to think of emotional support as purely altruistic. When you comfort someone you love, it’s because you care about their wellbeing, period. Their pain matters to you, independent of any benefit you might receive. This is true, but it’s not the complete truth.
The reality is that our wellbeing is interdependent. When the people we love are struggling, it affects us. Not just because we feel empathy for their pain, but because their capacity to be present, to support us, to participate in the relationship gets compromised when they’re depleted.
The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
This is literally true in close relationships. Your stability depends on theirs. Their capacity to care for you depends on you caring for them. It’s not transactional, but it is mutual.
When you comfort your partner, your child, or your friend, you do so because you genuinely care about them. Still, you’re also, perhaps unconsciously, maintaining the emotional infrastructure of the relationship. You’re ensuring that the person you depend on remains able to function, to be present, to reciprocate support when you need it eventually.
In healthy relationships, there’s an implicit understanding: we’ll be there for each other. When you’re down, I’ll help you up. When I’m down, you’ll help me up. This mutual support is what makes relationships sustainable through difficulty.
But this contract has a vulnerability. For it to work, both people need to maintain enough stability to be the supporter rather than always the supported. If one person is perpetually in crisis, the system breaks down. The other person becomes exhausted from constant caretaking with no opportunity to be cared for in return.
This is why you sometimes comfort someone partly to preserve their capacity to comfort you eventually. You’re not being selfish, you’re maintaining the balance that makes mutual support possible. You’re ensuring that this person you depend on doesn’t collapse to the point where they have nothing left to give.
The writer Cheryl Strayed captured something related when she wrote, “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success.”
In relationships, we often need to help others feel stable enough to continue being present for us. It’s not about making them comfortable with our success; it’s about maintaining their basic capacity to show up.
When it’s healthy and when it’s not
This dynamic exists on a spectrum from healthy interdependence to problematic codependence. The line isn’t always clear, but there are indicators:
Healthy interdependence looks like this: You comfort them when they’re struggling because you care about them AND because you recognize that your lives are connected. You help them process their difficulty without taking it on yourself. You maintain your boundaries while being supportive. When they recover, they’re genuinely able to be there for you. The support flows in both directions over time.
Unhealthy codependence looks like this: You comfort them to manage your own anxiety about their state. You take responsibility for their emotions as if they’re yours to fix. You neglect yourself while propping them up. You’re not actually comforting them from a place of strength; you’re trying to stabilize them so you feel less unstable. The relationship becomes about managing each other’s fragility rather than supporting each other’s growth.
The key difference is whether you’re comforted from overflow or from depletion. When you have something to give and choose to give it, that’s healthy. When you’re providing what you don’t have because you need them to be okay so that you can be okay, that’s problematic.
There is always a burden of being the strong one.
There’s often one person in a relationship who tends to be the stabilizer, the rock, the one who holds things together. This person frequently finds themselves in the position of comforting others, so those others remain functional enough to offer comfort in return eventually.
This role is exhausting in ways that are hard to articulate. You’re not only dealing with your own struggles; you’re managing someone else’s emotional state so they don’t collapse, and you’re doing this while carrying your own weight, often without being able to share how heavy it feels because sharing might overwhelm the person you’re trying to keep stable.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön observes, “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.”
When you’re always the one doing the healing, when you’re comforting others partly to preserve their capacity to show up for you, the relationship starts to feel unequal even when both people genuinely care for each other.
Recognizing that you comfort others so they can comfort you means acknowledging how much you need them. This is vulnerable. It’s admitting that you can’t do this alone, that your wellbeing is tied to theirs, that you’re investing in their stability because you depend on it.
We often resist this acknowledgment because it feels like weakness. We want to be self-sufficient, not need anyone else, and give support from pure altruism rather than need, but this resistance to interdependence is itself a form of brittleness.
The writer bell hooks wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
Comforting someone, even in part, so that they can comfort you, isn’t a failure of independence; it’s an acknowledgment of the communion that actual healing requires.
What happens when they can’t comfort you back?
The painful reality is that sometimes, despite your efforts to support someone so they can support you, they remain unable to show up for you. They might be dealing with something too overwhelming. They might lack the capacity or skill for reciprocal support. They might be unable or unwilling to hold space for your struggles after you’ve held space for theirs.
This is one of the lonelier experiences in relationships. You’ve invested in their stability, you’ve comforted them through difficulty, and when you need them, they’re not there. Not necessarily through malice, often through genuine inability, but the result is the same: you’re alone with your pain in a relationship where you expected mutual support.
The poet David Whyte writes about “the doorway of disappointment”, that moment when expectations meet reality and reality wins. When someone you’ve comforted can’t comfort you back, you’re standing in that doorway, and what you do following shapes the future of the relationship.
What would change if we explicitly discussed this pattern? If instead of pretending support is purely altruistic, we acknowledged the interdependence?
“I need you to be okay partly because I need you to be able to be there for me when I’m not okay.”
This sounds selfish, stated baldly, but it’s also honest, and in that honesty is the possibility of genuine partnership rather than the fantasy of independence.
Making this explicit could lead to healthier dynamics. Both people could acknowledge that they’re investing in each other’s stability as part of investing in the relationship. Both could be more intentional about maintaining their capacity to show up for each other. Both could recognize when they’re depleted and communicate that rather than pretending to be endlessly available.
Interdependence is not mercenary.
Despite the complexity and vulnerability, there’s something beautiful about comforting someone you love, partly so they can comfort you. It’s not mercenary, it’s human.
It means you’re choosing to be part of an interdependent system rather than trying to be an island. It means you trust this person enough to invest in their wellbeing, knowing that your own wellbeing is connected to theirs. It means you’re building something together that’s stronger than either of you alone.
In relationships, we’re constantly being called to be more than we are alone, to care for others while acknowledging we need their care, to give support while admitting we need support, to be strong enough to hold someone up while being vulnerable enough to let them hold us.
Now, let’s examine how to do it consciously. If you’re going to comfort others partly to preserve their capacity to comfort you, do it consciously rather than unconsciously.
Acknowledge your own needs openly. Don’t hide behind pure altruism. “I want to support you through this, and I also want you to know that I’m going through something too, and I’ll need you to be there for me when you can.” This makes the interdependence explicit.
Set boundaries that preserve your capacity. You can’t give what you don’t have. Supporting someone when you’re depleted doesn’t help either of you. “I want to be here for you, and right now I need to take care of myself so I can do that from a stable place.”
Notice when you’re over-functioning. If you’re constantly propping someone up, working harder at their stability than they are, the dynamic is off. Healthy interdependence means both people are responsible for their own wellbeing and support each other. You can’t do their work for them.
Ask for reciprocity when you need it. Please don’t assume they’ll know you need support. “I’ve been holding space for you through this difficulty. I need you to hold space for me now.” This isn’t keeping score; it’s acknowledging that the flow needs to go both directions.
Evaluate whether the system is sustainable. If you’re constantly giving support and rarely receiving it, if you’re comforting someone so they can relax, but they never do, that’s essential information about the relationship. Not necessarily information that means you leave, but information that means things need to change.
We comfort those we love for multiple reasons simultaneously. Because we genuinely care about their wellbeing. Because seeing them suffer is painful to us. Because we’re committed to supporting them through difficulty. And yes, because we need them to remain stable enough to help us when we’re struggling eventually.
All of these reasons can coexist. The last one doesn’t negate the others; it just makes the picture more complete and more honest.
The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “An honorable human relationship... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
Part of that refining is being honest about the interdependence, that we comfort partly to be comforted, that we give partly so we can receive, that we’re all caught up in systems of mutual need that are both beautiful and fragile.
When you comfort someone you love so they can comfort you, you’re not being manipulative or selfish. You’re acknowledging something true about how relationships actually work: we depend on each other. Their capacity affects yours. Your stability supports theirs. It’s mutual, messy, and deeply human.
This interdependence is both the strength and vulnerability of close relationships. When it works, it creates something larger than either person alone, a system where you’re not just adding your capacities together but amplifying them. When it breaks down, though, it can leave you hollowed out, pouring yourself into someone who has nothing left to give back.
The path forward isn’t pretending we don’t need each other or performing a selflessness we don’t actually feel. It’s acknowledging interdependence honestly, tending to it consciously, and watching for the quiet accumulation of imbalance before it becomes a chasm.
We comfort those we love partly so they can comfort us not only for that reason, but not without it either. This isn’t a flaw in how we love. It’s the foundation we build on, the recognition that we were never meant to carry everything alone.