Why Relationships Wear You Out — Not Because There Are Too Many — the Structure Where an Obligation to Answer Produces Depletion

Introduction

The more you deal with people, the more you are worn down. Each time you answer a message, each time you take a consultation, there is a sense of being shaved away little by little.

Yet whether reducing relationships makes it easier — it does not, quite. Isolate yourself and another kind of suffering arrives. So you keep tiring while keeping the relationships — and you can no longer escape this back-and-forth.

The techniques of reducing relationships have already been discussed at length. What this article sets down is the question one step upstream: why a relationship is experienced as depletion — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. The cause of the fatigue is not the number of relationships but whether the relationship has taken a shape that produces “an obligation to answer expectations.”

Answering Manufactures Expectation

First, let me confirm the point where depletion begins.

You receive a consultation from someone. You answer. They thank you. Up to here it looks healthy.

The problem is that each time you answer, the expectation “ask this person and an answer comes back” settles inside the other. The next question comes. You answer again. Within this repetition, “being answered” becomes the value of the relationship. On the day they were answered they are satisfied; on the day they were not, they feel discontent.

Once this structure is complete, you begin to function as “a vessel for the desire to be approved.”

And what is decisive is that you come to keep saying not what you want to issue but what the other wants to hear. You keep returning not your true words but the answer the other expects. Most of your energy is spent on this response to expectation from outside.

The true form of depletion is not the number of people dealt with. It is that the obligation “I must keep answering expectations” piles up with each relationship.

Words of Gratitude Have a Binding Force

What makes depletion still more troublesome is that it is hard to recognise “being tired” for yourself.

Words of gratitude keep arriving even as you are depleted. The voice “I am helped because you are here” brings guilt about pulling away. If you reduce the relationships, you will be betraying the people who expect something of you — such a sense is born.

This can be called “the binding force that words of gratitude hold.” A sense of responsibility binds you, and you become unable to admit your own limit. As a result, unable even to take proper rest, you keep prioritising what is demanded over what you truly want to do.

At this point, you have become not a “party” to the relationship but a “service provider.” You are moving not in order to express your own thinking but in order to answer the other’s expectation. This inversion hollows out the very will to be involved.

Number Has a Structural Ceiling

There is one more unavoidable fact.

By the research of the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, there is a ceiling on the number of social relationships a human being can stably maintain. Dunbar estimated it at about 150 [Dunbar, 1992]. Not the mere number of acquaintances, but the number of relationships in which you grasp each other’s situation to some degree and can maintain trust.

Beyond this number, maintaining an individual relationship with every counterpart becomes physically impossible. Yet the one who approaches seeking the sense of “there is an individual relationship” does not let go of that expectation. They keep minding whether you remember them, whether you answer their messages.

Here I want to note the fact that the quality and the number of relationships are in a trade-off.

A deep relationship with 100 people and a shallow relationship with 10,000 hold wholly different meanings. In the former, true dialogue arises on the basis of understanding each other’s situation. In the latter, there is only one-directional provision of information, and the other stays a consumer of it.

The expansion of number is easily made visible and functions as an “index of success.” Meanwhile, that this expansion is lowering the quality of relationship is hard to see. The figure keeps growing while the substance of the relationship keeps thinning.

▸ This “trade-off of number and quality” is treated in why the more followers you gain, the thinner the relationships grow.

Design a Limit, and the Other’s Autonomy Grows

So what should be done?

For myself, I reached one answer at an early stage. Regarding a service where I engage deeply and individually, I made the judgement “the limit is 3 to 5 people at once,” and set the policy “in a period when I truly cannot pour in my effort, I decline.”

This may look like a defensive measure to avoid depletion. But what it actually brought was an improvement in the quality of relationships.

The stance “accept anyone” brings the thinning of relationships. The stance “to the relationships I accept, contribute thoroughly” brings density to the relationship.

And there was a more important discovery. Designing a limit itself prompts the other’s autonomy.

In an environment “answers everything,” a habit of asking before thinking is born. But when the limit “this is as far as you can rely on me” is made explicit, the other holds the motive to think for themselves. The design of a limit functions not only to protect yourself but also to protect the other’s power to think.

From here a paradox comes into view. “The more you try to answer, the less the relationship functions.”

Note that the choice “to decline” is not rejecting the other. A refusal grounded in the judgement “right now I cannot deliver what you truly need” is a choice that respects the other. Rather than keeping up a half-hearted involvement, declining clearly is, for both sides, more sincere.

Conclusion: Not Reduce, but Change the Shape

That relationships wear you out was not because there are too many, nor because you are weak. It is because the relationship has taken a shape that produces “an obligation to answer expectations,” and that obligation piles up with each answer.

So what is needed is not to reduce relationships. It is to change the shape of the relationship.

One question suffices to tell them apart. In this relationship, is my thinking moving?

If it is a relationship of only handing over answers, you are depleted and the other stops thinking. If it is a relationship of bringing each other’s observations, the same time turns into the updating of thinking. Even the same “dealing with people,” if the design differs, becomes either depletion or expansion. The whole of this design is gathered in why the more you connect, the lonelier you grow.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Dunbar, R. I. M. “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates” (1992) Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6)
• Weber, M. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press