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# What Love Gets to Ask
- URL: https://www.simplyseekingbalance.com/what-love-gets-to-ask/
- Published: 2026-10-05T15:18:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-05T15:42:07.000Z
- Description: Relationships create obligations, but do they entitle us to the expressions of love we prefer? A family gathering becomes a question about boundaries, maintenance, and what people can build beside a legitimate no.
- Author: Linda
- Tags: Essay

I went to a family birthday party and discovered that I had apparently been missed.

This was very sweet. It was also exhausting.

Within a fairly short period of time, I was hugged, questioned about my late brother, told about memories of me that I couldn't retrieve, invited to future gatherings, reminded of some less flattering family mythology and informed that I had achieved aunt status without realizing I had ever successfully performed the role. I was also given a considerable amount of information about who in the room resembled my brother Donald.

My family is emotionally intense and physically affectionate. I can manage quite a lot of intensity myself when I'm interested in something; casual physical affection and emotional intensity directed at me are another matter.

There is a surprisingly persistent social assumption that reluctance is sometimes an invitation to try harder—that enough warmth, touching or encouragement will eventually reveal that the reluctant person wanted to participate after all. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it is spectacularly not.

I was glad I had gone. I wanted my adult son to know this part of his family, and I was touched by how much my presence meant to people. I also wanted considerably less touching, emotion and memory arriving at me simultaneously.

After some sleep and distance, something else became clearer. If somebody I hadn't seen in decades suddenly appeared at a family gathering, I might ask questions too. I might tell them I was glad they came. I might awkwardly try to establish where they belonged in the family now.

That's not peculiar behavior. It's boringly human.

What remained peculiar was the assumption that my way of participating needed correction. Somewhere between *of course they wanted something from me* and *no, they don't get to decide how I provide it*, I found a question I hadn't realized I was asking:

**What does a relationship actually entitle us to expect from one another?**

## Family asks things

My husband's advice before the party was admirably economical: don't go. Better not to open a box that may have belonged to Pandora.

He was protecting someone he knows finds these gatherings difficult. I disagreed. That's how you end up with no family.

I don't actually believe we owe one another nothing. I think relationships create obligations. Family especially does.

I went partly because my niece was turning fifty and the people important to her were gathering. I wouldn't have driven hours to attend the fiftieth birthday of an arbitrary woman in another state.

Relationship changed the claim.

That doesn't mean my niece could command my attendance. But she had standing to ask, and her disappointment would have mattered to me in a way a stranger's wouldn't.

We've become quite fluent in the language of boundaries: *You don't owe anyone anything. Protect your peace. No is a complete sentence.*

Sometimes that's useful medicine. But I don't think it's a complete description of relationship. If nobody gets to expect anything from anybody, I'm not sure what distinguishes a relationship from two people who happen to know one another.

Family gets to ask. Friends get to ask. Spouses certainly get to ask. They may even get to be disappointed by the answer.

The trouble begins when the right to ask quietly becomes the right to decide what the answer should be.

**You may owe people something without owing them what they want.**

That distinction seems obvious now. It has not always been obvious to me.

## I thought relationships happened

For much of my life, I think I treated relationships as things that either existed or didn't. We were friends because we liked each other. We were family because we were family. If somebody wanted something from me, presumably they would say so. If nobody said anything, apparently everything was fine.

This turns out to be a somewhat inadequate maintenance program.

I've lost relationships that way. Not necessarily through arguments or betrayals. Sometimes maintaining the relationship became difficult for me to understand or perform, so I shut down and moved on. I didn't always recognize that as a decision, and I certainly didn't always acknowledge its consequences.

Silence seemed neutral. It isn't. Silence communicates too. It's simply an unusually unreliable communicator.

After my mother died, and again after I learned I was autistic, I revisited a number of old relationships and apologized for things I understood differently with new information. Some people seemed to hear those apologies as something larger than I meant: that I had concluded there was something fundamentally wrong with the person I had been.

That wasn't it.

I had learned that relationships contained maintenance requirements I hadn't always recognized. I could regret that something I did—or failed to do—had cost another person without turning the apology into a verdict on myself. More importantly, understanding what someone had expected from me didn't automatically mean deciding that every expectation had been reasonable.

But realizing there *had been* expectations to negotiate was rather a revelation.

## Maintenance

I now remind myself to call a friend.

That sentence probably sounds faintly appalling to someone who naturally thinks, *I miss my friend. I shall call her.*

I don't usually experience friendship that way. I can enjoy seeing someone. I can care very much what happens to them. If we're together, I'll ask questions and tell them things about my life. But I rarely find myself yearning to get on the telephone merely to exchange accounts of what we've been doing.

Shared activity is different. Show me something interesting, ask me to come do something, help me think about a problem or suggest that we go somewhere, and there I am.

Apparently, however, friendship doesn't remain alive indefinitely merely because I continue to regard the person fondly from somewhere offstage. So I call sometimes because I have learned that maintenance is part of having the relationship I claim to value.

My husband understands this rather better than I do despite not seeking out many friendships. He maintains work friendships. He helps people before he needs help from them, checks in and keeps relationships topped off like tanks he knows he may someday need to draw from.

That can sound transactional until you notice that reciprocity is one of the things relationships are for. I help you; you help me; eventually we stop keeping precise accounts. The transactions accumulate into trust.

The value isn't merely in eventually getting the favor back. The maintained relationship is itself something of value.

This was apparently screamingly obvious to everyone except me.

## The rules everyone forgot to mention

I've had this experience before.

For years I thought my eye contact was perfectly normal. I remembered to look at people, remembered not to look too long, looked away and remembered to look back.

At some point it occurred to me that perhaps other people weren't consciously running these instructions.

Oh.

This isn't a novel observation about autism. Autistic people have described consciously learning social rules, using scripts and monitoring things such as eye contact and conversational timing that other people may handle more automatically. I simply didn't know that description applied to what I was doing.

The diagnosis gave me a name for a pattern, not a border between me and everyone else. Most of the individual variations are thoroughly human; mine simply arrived in a combination that made some of the unwritten rules unusually difficult for me to see.

There are a surprising number of things like this. As a child, when I didn't intuitively understand what a social situation required, I built crude little models from what I saw other people doing—or avoided the situation altogether.

Children remain particularly mysterious. My mother loved them and seemed to know instinctively what one was supposed to do with them. Much of my family appears to possess the same ability. Put a child in front of me and some internal emergency program activates:

BE SWEET.

I become unnaturally pleasant while trying to determine what comes next.

Relationships, I am discovering, contain another one of these packets of compressed social knowledge. Many people seem able to decompress *friend* into calling, remembering, inviting, checking in, asking questions, reciprocating disclosures, showing up and repairing small ruptures.

I saw *friend*.

Apparently there were appendices.

Sheldon Cooper's relationship agreement suddenly seems less like pure lunacy. Not less funny. But I understand the appeal.

Could somebody please outline the obligations?

Worse, each newly visible rule seems to expose another one I didn't know I hadn't understood.

Apparently there were appendices to the appendices.

## The Donalds

Family may be where all this gets most complicated because family carries more than affection. It carries history.

At the party, people kept asking me about my brother Donald. Does this person remind you of Donald? How? Do you remember this?

Donald's grandson told me how important his grandfather had been to him and how much he had shaped his path into working with cars. I remember a different man.

Donald was fourteen years older than I was and left home when I was still very young. When my first pet rat arrived in a box—an Easter present after my family apparently failed to find a bunny—he insisted on opening it himself, presumably to make certain it couldn't bite me. He cut into the box and made the rat's tail bleed.

He bought me a hermit crab that I simultaneously loved having and found profoundly creepy. Once, proud that I had learned a song at school, he marched me in front of his wife-to-be and made me perform it.

He was also the brother who decided that a child he considered spoiled should sit in front of a plate of food for hours until she ate it. I eventually fled to the bathroom and refused to come out.

There are memories I don't forgive. There are others in which he protected me.

My mother said that when I was a baby he used to watch me almost as though I were an animal in nature he was investigating. He was a fisherman. He had a troublesome childhood. Apparently he also grew older, raised a family and became a grandfather who passed on knowledge about cars and resilience that mattered deeply to someone else.

That's about what I know of Donald. His family knows other things. There were several Donalds in that room, and none of them was counterfeit.

And perhaps that's why they were asking. They weren't necessarily looking for the authoritative biography of Donald. They were asking for the Donald that belonged to me.

Families do that. Who do I look like? Was Grandpa always like this? Where did Dad get that? What was she like before I knew her?

I've asked versions of those questions myself while doing genealogy and while meeting sides of my family I knew little about. I've heard them from people trying to understand where they fit in family histories they didn't fully share.

We're constantly trying to locate ourselves in the people who came before us. Family is one of the structures through which that information travels.

My difficulty is that I have very poor autobiographical memory. I don't carry an easily accessible internal archive of scenes and feelings. When someone asks me to retrieve the family past on demand, there often isn't much available.

"I don't remember" can sound like a statement about importance. For me, it usually isn't. It's a statement about retrieval.

That seems worth explaining—not because I need permission to say *I don't remember*, but because if I want the relationship, making myself legible may be part of maintaining it.

## Not that. What instead?

This is where boundaries become more interesting to me.

If I say, "Don't touch me," there isn't much to negotiate about the touching. My body doesn't become a committee decision because someone else experiences affection physically.

But the other person's preference doesn't therefore become irrelevant. If physical affection is one of the ways someone experiences closeness, my refusal may disappoint them. That disappointment is information.

It isn't authority.

Likewise, my discomfort is information. It doesn't necessarily govern every other aspect of the relationship.

The question after a boundary may therefore be:

**All right. Not that. What instead?**

Don't touch me; come sit beside me. I won't promise the next family gathering; invite me and let me decide. I may not remember someone the way you hope I will; tell me your stories and perhaps one will connect to something I know. I don't want to dance; I can enjoy watching you dance. I don't want constant contact; I can make some effort not to disappear without explanation.

That isn't splitting the difference. We don't compromise on unwanted touching by touching me half as much. We move the negotiation to somewhere both people can actually participate.

And sometimes I may choose to participate in the other person's preferred way because the cost to me is small and the value to them is large. I don't have to prefer every party, hug, phone call or family ritual in order to decide that some are worth giving.

The sweet spot is probably not wanting identical things. It's finding adjacent things that satisfy both people enough that neither has to continually falsify themselves to maintain the relationship.

Sometimes there may be no adjacent territory. One person may need a kind or frequency of closeness the other cannot sustainably provide. Affection doesn't guarantee compatibility.

That can be sad without making either person wrong.

But I don't think I get to discover that merely by doing nothing until the relationship disappears. If I claim to value the relationship, some of the maintenance belongs to me.

## What love gets to ask

Maybe that's the distinction I was missing.

A relationship creates standing. Standing creates legitimate expectations, and some of those expectations become obligations. None of that creates unlimited authority over the other person.

Love gets to ask quite a lot.

It can ask me to drive somewhere when staying home would be easier, listen to a story I've heard before, make a phone call I wouldn't spontaneously think to make, or explain a silence someone else reasonably experienced as rejection. It can ask me to take another person's disappointment seriously instead of dismissing it as their problem.

It can ask for maintenance.

Relationships don't remain recognizable merely because two people still care about one another. Maintenance is part of how they remain recognizable to both people.

But relationship works in both directions. Affection doesn't make every preferred expression obligatory. A person who loves through touch may sometimes have to sit beside someone instead. A person who prefers distance may sometimes have to make the call. Neither gets to define love entirely in their own language and call the other deficient for failing to speak it.

And a boundary doesn't settle every question merely because it settles one. My no can be completely legitimate while your disappointment is also legitimate. If I still claim to value the relationship, I may have some responsibility for what happens next.

Perhaps that's what I've been learning rather late: the point of a boundary isn't always to end the conversation. Sometimes it tells us where the conversation has to move. Disappointment is not necessarily injury. Refusal is not necessarily rejection.

Some people appear to know all this without being told. Some of us could have used the manual.

In its absence, I have some questions instead:

*What does this relationship reasonably ask of me?*

*What may I reasonably ask of you?*

*And if one of us says no—what can we build next to it?*