"You are not asking for too much. You are just asking the wrong person."
If you have ever been told you are “too much,” what they usually mean is “too much for me.” Your needs did not suddenly become unreasonable just because someone else was unwilling or unable to meet them.
There is a specific kind of shame that appears when someone tells you that you are asking for too much. It makes you question your needs, your expectations, and sometimes even your entire personality. You start wondering if you are the problem. You replay conversations, soften your voice, edit your messages, and cut your needs down to bite-sized pieces, hoping that if you just ask for “less,” you will finally be worth staying for.
The truth is simpler and less dramatic than your anxiety wants it to be. You are not asking for too much. You are just asking the wrong person. There are people who will experience your bare minimum as excess, because it exposes how little they are actually willing to give. Your desire for clarity will feel like interrogation to someone who survives on confusion. Your wish for emotional safety will feel like a burden to someone who has never learned to sit with their own feelings.
When someone tells you that your standards are unrealistic, what they might really mean is “I do not want to grow to meet them.” That is their limitation, not your failure. Healthy people do not shame you for wanting honesty, effort, follow-through, respect, or reciprocity. They might not always get it right, but they will show curiosity instead of defensiveness when you express a need. They will lean in, not shut down.
Lowering your standards to keep misaligned people in your life is a slow form of self-abandonment. You train yourself to be grateful for crumbs and call it love. You start celebrating bare minimum gestures as if they are grand acts of devotion. Over time, you forget what it feels like to be met fully, because you have been living in rooms where the ceiling was set far too low.
You are allowed to keep your needs exactly as they are and simply change the room you are standing in. The people who are right for you will not experience your needs as demands. They will see them as invitations to show up with the same level of care, presence, and integrity that they also want in return. You are not asking for too much. You are asking the wrong person, and it is safe to stop doing that.
