254. You're Doing Too Much: How Over-Responsibility Ruins Your Relationships

In this episode of Your Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast, I pull back the curtain on one of the most destructive patterns I see in women who are smart, capable, and completely worn out. I share stories from my own first marriage — including the season I drove to sales calls while six months pregnant so my ex-husband could build a business he never built. I was functioning as his parent, not his partner.

This pattern doesn't disappear after divorce. It follows you into dating. It shows up when you calculate a man's schedule and decide he deserves grace for being unavailable — before he's even taken you on a date. You owe him nothing. Your job is to decide whether he fits your life, not manage the reasons he can't show up for it.

Over-responsibility creates under-responsibility — in your partner and in yourself. While you pour your energy into someone else's growth, your finances, your career, your relationships with your kids, your health — all of it sits on pause. That pause becomes years. Years become your life.

You deserve better than a life built around someone else's potential.

Ready to break this pattern for good? Schedule a relationship strategy session with Sade at sadecurry.com/schedule-appointment.

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Sade Curry, and I am your host. Today we're talking about creating your extraordinary life after divorce — or if you are thinking about divorce and you're in a difficult marriage, this podcast is for you. And if you're thinking about creating new relationships after divorce, this podcast is for you. So welcome to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. It is such a pleasure to be with you here today.

Today we're talking about over-responsibility, and its twin: under-responsibility. I don't know how much of under-responsibility we'll get into today. I'm going to try to combine them both in this one episode so you get both sides of the coin, but if not, we'll do a Part Two and continue it later in the month.

I want to start by talking about my first marriage and the way I showed up. I think one of the things that is hard to articulate when you're in the relationship space — when you're a life coach, especially working with women who are in difficult marriages, women who have been with partners who have narcissistic tendencies, partners who are abusive or cruel — is to be able to show a woman the ways she contributed to the dynamic without victim blaming. Because no matter how over-responsible or under-responsible you are, no one deserves to be abused. No one deserves to be manipulated or abused just because they did too much. That's not okay. So I'm going to try to do this with a lot of nuance, drawing on my own personal examples, because we cannot create change until we change our own patterns.

Let me give you a bit of my story to illustrate this. Throughout my first marriage, my ex-husband showed up with a huge sense of entitlement. I grew up in a culture that endorsed the idea that men were entitled to behave in certain ways, and layered on top of that cultural programming was religious programming. I was an ardent Christian — born again, highly religious — and that religion also endorsed men being entitled to certain things. So when I think about myself at 21 when I got married, and through my 20s into my 30s, I had no understanding that there was no moral code binding me to delivering what my ex-husband wanted. But I did, somewhat. I wouldn't call myself the perfect submissive wife, but I did believe that I should submit, so I was working as hard as I could to do that.

In that dynamic — not through any fault of mine per se, because this was the culture I was raised in, this was the conditioning and training I had received — it wasn't as though I was wrong for doing that. And in many ways, was he wrong for doing it? I don't know, because that was his conditioning and the culture he was brought up in. However, the negative impact of his behavior on me was far greater than any negative impact of what I was doing by over-functioning.

So with that background laid, what I did throughout the marriage that "contributed" — and I put contributed in quotes, because again, no woman deserves to be abused, no person deserves to be treated with cruelty — was that I took it upon myself to make sure that he didn't fail. It was important to me that he succeeded in whatever he wanted to do, even if he was bound to fail.

Here's an example. Early in the marriage, he struggled with authority at work. He struggled with collaborating in the workplace, so he was always trying to move out on his own, or he would get let go, or he would quit suddenly without having another job lined up. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. In one particular situation — and this was very early on — I was pregnant with our first child. I was working full time, he had been working full time, and then he left his job suddenly. He decided he was going to run a tutoring business. He started it, and he would be home all day working on it, but he wouldn't go on any sales calls. People would call and ask to hire a tutor for their kids, but he had social anxiety and was too afraid to actually go on those calls.

So I would get up in the morning — and mind you, I was about six months pregnant — go to work, spend nine hours there, come home, and then in the evening get in the car and go with him on these sales calls. I look back now and I think: what was happening? It looked like support. It looked like being helpful, like being kind, like trying to help someone succeed. But I was being over-responsible. This other person needed to face his own fears. He needed to fail — or succeed — on his own so that he could pivot, grow, change, become more self-aware, and handle his own adult responsibilities. He was not a child. He was a full-grown adult. We were both married adults, and I was pregnant with his child, but I was functioning for him like I was his parent.

When I say it in this context, it sounds crazy. But ladies, I know that you are doing this. I talk to hundreds of women every year, and a large majority are doing this in one form or another. I've talked to women who are dating — you're doing it while dating. I've talked to women who are married — you're doing it while married. I've even talked to women who are in the middle of a divorce and are still being overly responsible, still extending themselves for the spouse who is divorcing them for his girlfriend. And of course we're doing it because we have been trained to do it. We have been conditioned to do it. We do it almost compulsively because of that training. And not just that — when we don't do it, when a woman says, "I'm not doing this," the whole world turns around and says, "Wait, what? You're so mean. You're so selfish."

Let me give you another example from my life, this time during the divorce. If you've been following the podcast, you have the background. I was blindsided by the divorce. I was busy trying to hold the marriage together even though he was the one who had been behaving badly. I was trying to get into therapy, trying to patch everything together. I had moved out temporarily with the kids — not a permanent move-out, more of a "you are acting really crazy, and I'm going to be at my friend's house with the kids until we can get some help" situation. I arranged the help, called the therapist, called the counselors, booked a counselor for him and one for me. The counselors were going to communicate with each other and help put things back together. I was taking care of the children outside of our normal space, driving them to all of their regular activities, trying to keep a sense of normalcy for them.

And during this period — about six weeks — I was also emailing him constantly, saying, "You really need to show up for therapy. We need to work this out." I was emailing him the kids' schedule. I was facilitating his relationship with the children while all of this was happening — while I was doing all of the actual physical work — and he was getting up every morning in his own house, generally taking care of only himself.

Did he show up for any of the kids' activities during this time? No. Not until a couple of days before our first court date, when he suddenly showed up and took the kids back to the house — presumably because he'd learned that the court would likely leave the children with whoever had them.

And that is the danger of over-responsibility: you do all of that and still lose out in the end. I've talked to women in the middle of their divorces doing the same things — being over-responsible, trying to facilitate the man's relationship with the children, a man who generally doesn't care too much about that relationship — only to find themselves on the other side with a poor, disconnected relationship with the kids themselves. Because while you were busy facilitating the man's relationship with the children, you were neglecting your own relationship with them. That is something I realized I did throughout that marriage: I neglected my own relationship with my kids because I was too busy trying to make him happy or facilitate his bond with them.

Being over-responsible — out of obligation, out of guilt, out of being overly invested in your partner's life — will cause you to be under-invested in your own life. You won't see the areas of your own life that need work: your own development, your financial growth, your career growth, your relationship with your kids, your relationships with friends, your health. It is inevitable that when you are overly responsible for someone else, you are automatically neglectful of yourself.

This happens because women have been conditioned to believe that our well-being, our financial future, our relational future, our status in society — everything we want, everything we are desiring — is wrapped up in our relationship with a man. We're taught that from a very young age through fairy tales, rom-coms, our parents, our aunts, our mothers. We subconsciously believe that everything we want is tied up in this one relationship. So we do all the work to make sure that relationship works, pouring in everything we have, because this is not a conscious belief anymore. If you had asked me fifteen years ago, "Is your entire life wrapped up in this man?" I'd have said, "My life is wrapped up in God." Of course it wasn't conscious.

So this is something to sit with slowly, in a very thoughtful, self-reflective way: Are there areas of your life where you are being overly responsible because of your conditioning — overly responsible to your partner?

Now, this does not apply to children. As my children move into young adulthood, I'm still working with them on a lot of their adulting, and that's totally okay. When you have a newborn, a toddler, a young child, a teenager, there is a level of over-responsibility that is appropriate because they cannot take care of themselves or protect themselves in the world. As they move into young adulthood, the transition begins — you start handing the reins over to them in their own lives. That's normal and healthy. Today I'm talking specifically about romantic relationships. It happens in other relationships too, but I think the biggest loss for women is when we are over-responsible in our romantic relationships.

Now, when a woman says, "I'm letting go — there are knives falling all over the place and I'm going to stop catching them, I'm going to take care of myself and my kids" — the world shows up and says, "Wait, what? You can't just let him fail. You can't just leave things alone." And here's another example from my life.

At this point the divorce hadn't been finalized — it took a couple of years — but the separation had happened, I'd gotten my own place with the kids. Of course, once things settled, he didn't really want to take responsibility for the older kids, because they would call him out on things. He essentially didn't contact them and wouldn't take advantage of his visitation. I don't want to go into a lot of detail about what happened with the kids, because those are their stories to tell.

But as a single mom at that point, I did need help from friends and family. I had a friend who would occasionally step in if I had a work conflict and couldn't get my kids to their activities. She was very kind and supportive. There was one particular day — maybe the first or second time she was helping — when she took my daughter across town for an event while I took my son to another event. Later, my daughter told me that this friend had asked if she was praying for her dad and had encouraged her to pray for him.

The world could not leave it alone. Not only was my friend encouraging my young daughter to take on emotional and spiritual responsibility for her father — when the father is the one who is supposed to be praying for his kids, supposed to be making sure his kids have what they need, supposed to be getting them to their activities, supposed to be setting them up for a successful future — but we were being told we couldn't just go and succeed on our own. "You have to help him." I know some of you listening, especially those from conservative cultures like mine, have heard that so much.

Here's an interesting aside: the word "secretary" — which, when you picture it, you picture a woman — actually came from a piece of furniture. When men went into the workplace, they had something like a filing cabinet where they organized their administrative work. That piece of furniture was called a secretary. When women were hired, they were essentially treated as that piece of furniture — just resources. There are so many threads we could pull on here when it comes to over-responsibility and the function of women as resources to support men.

Consider ADHD: people used to believe ADHD resolved itself in adulthood, partly because only boys were being diagnosed with it. When they got into their 20s, got girlfriends and got married, the ADHD magically disappeared — because women stepped in and took over the executive functioning.

So we've been conditioned to do it, and when we finally try to step back from it, people won't support us. You're going to take a hit to your reputation as a "good woman" when you try to step back from being over-responsible. You either remain over-responsible for the rest of your life, or you have to be willing for some people to disapprove of you pulling back.

By stepping in and being overly responsible for my ex-husband, I interrupted what would have been his normal path to maturity, success, failure, and learning. Ideally, he should not have still been learning those lessons at that age. But men who have these tendencies, who have this sense of entitlement, were often given that entitlement by their families of origin — families where the women did all the work, so the men never learned to figure things out for themselves. They step into marriage with that same expectation. And if, as a wife, you step in and don't let the man figure things out, you perpetuate the problem.

I stayed with this person for 17 years, and it was only in the last three years that I really started to pull back and set some boundaries — and all hell broke loose when I did. I'll never know whether, if I had been wise enough not to be overly responsible at the beginning of the marriage, he might have learned, changed, or figured it out on his own. But we'll never know, because I enabled it for so long.

So I want you to start thinking about yourself: where are you in this pattern of being overly responsible for the men in your life, or even for other adults? Leave children out of it for now — that requires much more nuance. But where are you being too responsible for other adults? And then ask yourself: when I'm putting in all of this mental energy, ruminating and scheming and planning and fixing — when I'm using my strategic mind for other people's executive functioning, spending my emotional and physical energy on them — where am I not being responsible enough in my own life? When I'm working on someone else's career, where am I not working on my own? Where am I not working on my own growth, my own potential?

I remember telling a story to a woman I spoke with about a month ago: when my ex-husband wanted to go back to graduate school, I did all of his applications. I wrote all of the essays and got him accepted into a math program — and I'm not even good at that. And then he didn't go. Of course he didn't, because he hadn't worked for the admission. She heard that and said, "Oh, that's nothing. I completed my ex's entire graduate degree. I did all of his homework."

I said, "Wow. Yes, you win."

Women, we are doing this everywhere. We have to stop. We have so much potential. The women I work with are so gifted, high-achieving, brilliant, hard-working — and we are taking all of that potential and dumping that energy and brilliance into black holes that are never going to produce a return on our investment. We need to stop.

Start to think about some of the signs that you might be over-functioning, overly responsible, carrying what isn't yours. Are you managing other people's feelings, their choices, their growth? Are you trying to prevent negative consequences in their lives, trying to shield them from negative feelings or experiences — at the expense of yourself? It can sound like: "He just needs support." "I don't want to pressure him." "I'm just better at this, so I should do it." "It's so easy for me — I can just get it done for him." "I'll just do this one time." If you are having any of those thoughts, you are being over-responsible.

Also, notice if you feel anxiety, tension, or guilt when someone else is in distress — not because they're in a life-or-death situation, but simply because they are failing to adult. They're failing to launch. And you cannot stand the feeling of guilt and discomfort in your body, so you compulsively step in to resolve it. That's over-responsibility.

And then ask yourself whether you are also being under-responsible. Are you neglecting your own needs, your own boundaries, your own decisions, your own finances? Are you failing to follow through on things in your own life? Because sometimes we subconsciously choose to be over-responsible for others because we are afraid to face the things we need to tackle in our own lives — afraid we'll fail, afraid we're not capable. So we think, "Well, I can do this for him, and that will sort of move me along without me having to actually face what I need to face on my own."

Are you procrastinating your own needs and growth? Telling yourself, "I'll focus on me once he's okay"? Are you tying your own outcomes to his — telling yourself that when he has a good outcome, you have a good outcome? That is under-responsibility for your own life.

Over-responsibility means carrying what belongs to someone else. Under-responsibility means postponing what you should be carrying for yourself as an adult, as an equal.

This shows up in so many situations. Women searching and scheduling therapy for their husbands — let him schedule his own therapy. And if he doesn't, it's better for you to face what that really means. Because this man is scheduling his golf sessions. He's scheduling his gym sessions. He's scheduling nights out with the boys. If he's not scheduling therapy with the same ease, he doesn't want to go. He doesn't think it's important. And it is more valuable for you to face that truth than to paper over it by being over-responsible.

In dating, over-responsibility shows up in much more subtle ways. I'll give you a recent example. A client and I spent a lot of time talking about this because what would happen was, she would be having conversations with men on the apps and they wouldn't be asking her out. But they would tell her things like, "Yeah, I have custody of my kids," or "I'm traveling a lot for work." And subconsciously, she would give them grace for not spending time with her in person — because they had their kids, or because they were traveling. On the surface, that looks reasonable. But as we talked in our sessions, I noticed that she was calculating his schedule for him and then using that calculation to decide whether or not he was right for her.

That's a very subtle form of over-responsibility, rather than asking: "He's unavailable because he's traveling for work — what does that mean for me? He's unavailable because he has his kids during his 50/50 time — what does that mean for me in a dating relationship?" She owed these people nothing.

My philosophy is: if a man does not have time to take women out on dates, he shouldn't be on the apps. If his kids need him that much, he needs to get off the apps and take care of his children. Because if she does end up with a person like that, it means this man does not have enough capacity to handle his adult responsibilities and parent his kids simultaneously — which means that when she comes into his life, she's going to be catching all those balls too. If this man cannot handle his life, his kids, and dating, he is not good with time management, and he may not have the self-awareness to recognize that and step back from something. For a woman to be giving grace for that means she's getting ready to jump into that situation and become over-responsible for him, his children, and the fact that he will never have enough time for her.

I know it's hard to explain this to women, because the reaction is, "Oh my god, Sade, you're so hard, you're so cynical." But it's just the math. The man does not have enough hours in the day. That's not going to get better when you move in together. What really clicked for my client was when I pointed out: "There are other men who have young children and 50/50 custody who are paying attention to you." And that's when it dawned on her — "Oh yeah, there are other men messaging me and we're going out. Sometimes we have to meet at odd hours because of the kids' schedule, but they make those hours available." Yes. The man who has the capacity to adult properly — while being a parent, having a job, and dating — will make that evident. You won't have to spend a lot of time giving him grace.

And again, there's a lot of nuance here. I'm giving this example because I'm working specifically with this client and I know the full circumstances. There are no formulas. It's always case by case, because you really can't take someone else's "ten signs" list and apply it wholesale to your dating life. But that's a whole other conversation.

That is one way that being over-responsible can show up in dating. It's subtle, and it doesn't necessarily stem from something the other person is doing wrong. The men in this example weren't doing anything wrong. They were just living their lives. The issue was with my client's thinking — the over-responsible patterns she had running — and that's what was causing her difficulty.

So: over-functioning creates under-functioning in your partner, and it creates under-functioning in your own life. The result is chaos. Over-responsibility is one of the first things I work on with clients when they tell me their relationships are chaotic. If there's a lot of drama, over-responsibility is almost always happening somewhere.

I want to pause here for today. I'll definitely pick this up in the next episode. But I want to invite you to sit with this — to have this conversation with yourself about over-responsibility.

If this is something you want to explore further, I have a worksheet with questions that help you examine whether you are being over-responsible. You can send me an email or book a consultation call, and we can work through it together. If you just want the worksheet, email me at team@sadecurry.com — T-E-A-M at S-A-D-E-C-U-R-R-Y dot com — and I will send it to you. I may also put a download link in the show notes. I'm recording this on March 17th, so hopefully by the end of the week there will be a page where you can download the over-responsibility worksheet. But if you want it right away, just email me and I'll get it to you immediately.

This is one of the biggest patterns that harms women. When people say, "You should take accountability for what happened in your marriage," this is one of the things we need to take accountability for — because mostly, it's women who are doing this, and it is harming us. We don't always see the consequences immediately, but five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the line, the consequences of being overly responsible in your relationships are devastating.

Thank you for your time and attention today. It has been my pleasure, and I will talk to you on the next episode.