My mother said it one evening, casually, while serving dinner. “I live only for you,” she said. “You are my whole world.”

She meant it as love. I received it as burden.

From that moment, her happiness became my assignment. Every decision I made—what to study, where to work, whom to marry—carried her mood as consequence. If I chose well, she would be happy. If I chose wrong, I would destroy the only thing she lived for.

I was nineteen when she said this. I am forty-six now. I am still learning to put the weight down.

This is what happens when someone makes you their reason for living. You become responsible for a life you did not ask to carry. Their joy depends on your choices. Their sorrow follows your failures. You are no longer a person with your own path. You are a vehicle for someone else’s emotional survival.

My friend Nasreen’s husband tells her constantly: “Without you, I am nothing.” He says this with love. She hears it with exhaustion. Because being someone’s everything means you can never be yourself. You must always be the version of you that keeps them whole. Your needs become secondary. Your desires become negotiations. Your autonomy becomes betrayal.

“I can’t even have a bad day,” Nasreen told me once. “If I’m sad, he panics. If I’m distant, he spirals. I have to manage his emotions constantly. I am his therapist, his mother, his reason to live. I am everything except his equal.”

This is not love. This is consumption. The person who says “I live only for you” is not offering devotion. They are outsourcing their emotional wellbeing. They are making you the manager of feelings they should manage themselves.

The manipulation is often invisible. It wears the mask of sacrifice. “I gave up everything for you.” “I worked my whole life so you could have opportunities.” “After all I’ve done, this is how you repay me?” These sentences sound like love. They function as chains.

My mother never asked me directly to abandon my dreams. She simply made sure I knew that my dreams would hurt her. She sighed when I mentioned moving to another city. She fell silent when I talked about careers she did not approve of. She did not forbid anything. She just made the cost clear: your freedom, my suffering.

So I stayed close. I chose the safe career. I married someone she approved of. I became the good son who made her happy, and I lost years of my life to a path that was never mine.

I am not blaming her. She did not know what she was doing. She had learned this pattern from her own mother, who had learned it from hers. The chain of emotional dependence stretched back generations. Each mother living through her children. Each child carrying weight they did not choose.

But understanding the origin does not erase the damage. And at some point, understanding must become action.

The hardest truth I have had to accept is this: I am not responsible for my mother’s happiness. I am not responsible for anyone’s happiness except my own. This sounds cold. It sounds selfish. It sounds like the opposite of what we are taught about love and family and duty.

But it is the only truth that allows real love to exist.

When I am responsible for your happiness, I cannot be honest with you. I must manage your feelings instead of speaking my truth. I must calculate the impact of every word, every choice, every small assertion of self. The relationship becomes performance. I am not relating to you. I am managing you.

When I am not responsible for your happiness, I can finally see you clearly. I can love you without carrying you. I can support you without becoming your foundation. I can be present without being consumed. This is not abandonment. This is respect—for my own life and for yours.

My mother is eighty now. A few years ago, I told her something I had never said before. I said: “Ma, I love you. But I cannot be your reason for living. You need to find meaning beyond me. I cannot carry that weight anymore.”

She cried. I expected this. She said I was ungrateful. I expected this too. For weeks, she barely spoke to me. The guilt was enormous. Every part of my conditioning screamed that I had done something terrible.

But slowly, something changed.

She started visiting old friends she had neglected. She joined a reading group at the local library. She began talking about her own interests—things she liked, places she wanted to see—instead of only talking about me. She became, for the first time in decades, a person with her own life.

Our relationship improved. Without the weight of being her everything, I could simply be her son. Without the burden of my happiness, she could simply be my mother. We talked more freely. We laughed more easily. The resentment I had carried—resentment I had never admitted to myself—began to dissolve.

Setting boundaries was not cruelty. It was the most loving thing I ever did. For both of us.

I think about Nasreen sometimes. She is still with her husband. She is still his everything. She tells me she is fine, but her eyes are tired in a way they were not ten years ago. She has become so skilled at managing his emotions that she has forgotten she has her own.

I want to tell her that she can put the weight down. That she is allowed to be a person, not a function. That his emotional wellbeing is his work, not hers. That love does not require disappearing into someone else’s needs.

But I know she is not ready to hear it. I was not ready for decades. The conditioning runs deep. The guilt is powerful. The fear of being called selfish, ungrateful, unloving—this fear keeps us carrying weights we were never meant to carry.

If you recognize yourself in these words, I want to say something to you.

You are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness. You are not the solution to someone else’s emptiness. You are not required to sacrifice your life so that someone else can avoid building their own.

This does not mean abandoning people you love. It means loving them as a whole person, not as their emotional caretaker. It means being present without being consumed. It means offering support without offering your soul.

The people who say “I live only for you” need to learn to live for themselves. This is not your work to do for them. This is their journey. Your only responsibility is not to block it by perpetually providing what they should be finding within.

Put the weight down.

You have carried it long enough.

It was never yours to carry.