The trouble is, when you’ve been so good at caring for everyone else, you often forget — or never learned — how to identify what you need and how to ask for it. And here’s the kicker: people can’t read your mind.

I often hear women in this stage say they’re tempted to scrap a relationship because “it’s not working anymore.” But sometimes, it’s not that the relationship is broken — it’s that what you need from it has changed, and you haven’t yet named it.