Purpose in your heart to NEVER be a burden to anyone. You become a slave to whosoever sets you free.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Only when you learn to set your own self free, do you truly become a master of your life.
I am NOT saying don’t depend on anyone, that doesn’t happen, independence is an illusion. We live for others and others live for us.
I am saying live in such a way that those you depend on, also depend on you.
Dependence is slavery, independence is a fallacy, the real secret to winning in life and love is interdependency.
Interdependency is the ability to go through life complementing our strengths with the strengths of others. But Dependency is going through life with an attitude of weakness, expecting other people to be your saviours.
You need other people, no one is an island. But…
The people you need, should need you. The people you ask from, should also ask from you.
Asking becomes begging if it’s only one way.
Example 1: How Women End Up as Beggars in Love
That’s what I almost asked one girl called Mia (not her real name) about the man in her life. But I quickly zipped my lips for fear of sounding too emotional.
The way he treated her choked me with helplessness. It felt like her pain mirrored my own, a suffocating weight on my soul.
Instead of settling for men they truly love and ones who love them too, many women like Mia settle into loveless marriages with unkind men simply because those men can cover their bills.
She lives in the house that he rents, and eats the food that he buys.
But he doesn’t respect her with the basic respect every human being needs.
He talks to his dog better than he talks to her.
He cheats over and over again and his apologies come so often it almost sounds like a song.
Every gift he buys her is a “sorry gift.” It’s meant to apologise for the latest wrong he just did.
She is always heartbroken, and cries herself to sleep almost every night.
But she still stays.
Ask her why and she replies “where can I go? Besides, I love him, he can be sweet at times.”
She thinks that what she feels towards him is love, yet what she really feels is dependency. And she feels grateful for those moments when he is good enough to meet her dependences.
It’s easy to mistake the person that you need for the person that you love. And the most difficult person to walk away from is an abuser that you feel grateful to.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Being in that person’s presence doesn’t make you happy, but you stay because his/her presence keeps you alive. You depend on that person for survival.
Love is only safe for the self-reliant.
Dependence means you need your partner. That makes you a burden.
Independence means your partner needs you. That means you have a burden. It’s also a bad deal.
Interdependence means you need a partner that also needs you. Now that’s a relationship that transforms your life and the life of the one you love!
Example 2: How Men Become Victims of Emotional Dependence
Then there was this other guy…
Let’s just call him TK for privacy…
He was deeply head over heels in love with a girl who clearly didn’t care about him. This girl meant the whole world to him, but to her he didn’t even mean a village!
He would go to the moon and back, for a woman who literally had to be “paid” to come see him.
He would type paragraphs just to get a one-word answer.
(Someone once said, love is a waste of time if it’s only one way.)
But still, TK couldn’t walk away.
He thought he was in love with her, but if he was really in love with her he wouldn’t be calling me crying and wishing he could just die and disappear from the face of the earth.
That doesn’t sound like love, it sounds like depression.
I told TK, “Whatever is going on between you is NOT love. And if you are still struggling to let her go, it shows there is something that her presence is giving to your soul.
There is something you found by being with her, and you are trying to keep on holding on to that thing even if being with her hurts. That thing she is feeding, is your self-esteem.”
You should have seen the way his force froze in realisation of the truth.
This was a beautiful girl that he believed was way beyond his class. She was the girl all the guys in the neighbourhood would have died to date.
So to him, having her for a girlfriend, told him and everybody else that he was star!
If he had conquered something that every other man had failed, it was winning this dazzling girl’s heart. It gave him a name. It gave him the most important feeling to a man, the feeling that he was a champion.
That’s why he couldn’t walk away. He kept on holding to a love that had long washed away.
What he was really fighting for wasn’t to be with her, he was fighting to remain the champion that her presence in his life had taught him to feel.
It’s NOT love that he was really feeling for her, it was dependency.
He had a self-esteem that depended on the presence of a beautiful woman in order to be high.
The Dangers of Dependency in Love
Life is a negotiation table, and every day you are either selling yourself cheap or valuable depending on the level of your dependency on others.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Even when it comes to getting a job or starting a business...
There are people who can pay you millions for the ideas in your brain. But If you don't know that, you can spend all your life working for someone who pays you peanuts as if you are a monkey.
Dependency can make you sell yourself short. It can make you compromise on your dignity, and make you settle in a relationship where your humanity is disrespected.
The problem is we are looking for someone who will make us feel valuable, make us happy or solve our financial problems.
Maybe one day we will understand that happiness, self-value and self-sustenance are every person’s the three top needs that should never be delegated.
1. No-one was born to make you happy.
People can only give you laughter, but happiness is something you create on your own.
That's why in my love relationship seminars I normally teach that,
Don't look for someone who makes you happy. Learn to make yourself happy and look for someone who doesn't take that happiness away.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Happiness is an inside job.
2. No-one was born to make you valuable.
Create your own value.
You create your value in the marketplace, by learning the skills or making products that put you in demand.
And you discover your own value as a person, by embracing the truth that you too was made in the image of the Creator.
And there are people with less gifts and worse pasts than yours who have gone on to achieve far greater than you ever imagined for yourself.
That's the secret to personal value! A sense of personal value unlocks your self-reliance, and self-reliance makes you negotiate on the tables of life from a point of interdependency rather than dependency.
Love should be a WIN/WIN arrangement.
3. No-one was born to take care of you forever. NOT Even your parents.
All People show up in your life for a season.
Do your best with what they give you, so that your survival doesn't keep on depending on their presence.
You are born for a burden NOT to be a burden.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
There are people for whom you will feel a burden to help. Help them to be strong enough to live life without you.
If you are making them dependent on you, then you are breaking them more than you are building them.
The Roots of Dependency in Love and Life
Mia’s Source of Dependency
So when it comes to Mia...
The real problem is NOT the man in her life. If that was the problem, she could have simply let him go.
But it's NOT that simple because the problem is NOT the man in her life, it's who she fears to become if that man leaves.
The real problem is that she has told herself she doesn't have what it takes to make a living for herself in this world.
That big fat stinky lie in her mind is the cause of all her dependency in this life.
I have seen some women walk away from abusive marriages with their husbands threatening "you can never make it without me out there!!!"
"You say I can't live without you - are you my WIFI?" I once heard one woman say 🤣
Funny enough, that's what gives her strength to work hard, start her cross-border trading business and pay her own bills.
I have seen many women depend on their husbands until their husbands suddenly pass away. And after some years of struggle and toil - these young widows go on to do extremely well in life!
Their life changes the day they realise, "wait a minute - I don't have a choice! My only hero is me!"
O how I wish every woman would know it early in life, that there is difference between looking for love and looking for sustenance.
Please share this article with every woman you know so that they can get this big point:
Dear woman: If you are looking for love, look for a man; but if you are looking for sustenance you are already enough on your own.
That's why one person once said
If a woman learns to make her own money, it will save her from unnecessary sex.
There are people you wouldn't love if your reasons for loving them wasn't your hungry stomach.
How About TK?
The same goes for TK.
He was looking for someone to complete him. People tell us to look for people that complete us.
That’s wrong.
A relationship is NOT a place for half people who are trying to be whole by meeting each other.
A relationship is a place for two individually whole people, who are meeting to make a life bigger than themselves.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Weaknesses are bad for love.
Your weaknesses will become a threat to your relationship more than they can be an opportunity for your partner to complete you.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Looking for someone who complements you, NOT someone who completes you.
You should be enough on your own. Those feelings of inadequacy, the feeling that you are NOT enough, is what makes many people fall and settle for wrong people.
They are NOT looking for love. They are looking for themselves, and wrongfully think they can find themselves by being with other people.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
But people are temporary in our lives. If you base who you are on who you have, you will find yourself in endless and exhausting struggles of trying to keep people in your life.
You will get trapped in a "please don't leave me" cycle of life.
You will feel like people are doing you a favour to keep you in their lives and to remain in yours.
That's because...
You are asking from people what you should be asking from yourself.
You are dependent.
3 Keys to Stop Living in Dependency, and Develop Self-Reliance for Interdependency
1. Stop the Pity Party
Dependency creates self-pity. Unfortunately, pity attracts abusers far more than it attracts heroes. Pity attracts your hunters more than it attracts your protectors. Pity makes you fall prey.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
So shut down that pity-party, your desire to be pitied will NOT get you anywhere.
Raise your head and face life head on, every living being has what it takes to make a living in the land of the living.
2. Unleash The Power for Life in You
Whether man or woman; dark brown, light brown, yellow or pink in complexion – every human being has what it takes to bend reality, fight the circumstances of life and live victoriously!
There is a power for life in the inside of you. That’s why you woke up alive when so much around keeps breaking down. The power of life in you is stronger than death around you.
The people you look up to, are just people who chose to fight the very same battles you are running away from.
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
They chose to believe in the very things that you are choosing to doubt – they believe in themselves (that they too can do something great with their lives).
They believe in life (that it has a code of success, and once you crack that code, success flows like an unending river).
Some of them believed in God, and by that, the power of the Creator filled them and transformed them into instruments of more creations.
3. Put On the Attitude of Self-Reliance
Aim to be a person of self-reliance, meeting your needs and lacking nothing. Refuse to be a burden to anyone.
In the journeys of life, pay your way. In the shelters of life, pay your stay.
If somebody disrespects you or seems to exploit you just tell yourself,
“This person doesn’t know who I really am. They are judging me by where I am; NOT where I am going. They will be shocked!”
Tell yourself,
“I was here before any of these people came into my life; I will still be here after all of them are gone. I will only keep in my space those people whose presence respects my dignity.”
And in everything you do, seek self-reliance. Only when you are able to stand alone can you truly be ready to stand with someone.
If you cannot stand alone, leaning on the person you claim to love will make you a burden in love. You will think you are looking for love, when you are looking for a crutch to save your limp.
Self-reliance is the only key to escaping dependency and unlocking interdependence.
Self-reliant people operate as team players in their marriages and relationships, but dependents are helpless and voiceless beneficiaries (and many times, losers).
Final Words
Demand self-reliance from yourself and work to grow that self-reliance every day.
Work your own money. Make your own happiness. Spell your own value in this world.
Don’t judge yourself by what you are going through, what really matters is where you are going!
- MOFFAT MACHINGURA
No matter how much it hurts, keep digging until you strike gold. It only takes one day.
One day the wind will change, and your present will become your past.
The aim is interdependency. To be important to someone as much as they are important to you.
Keep drilling until you strike water, and the life you have so often drunk from others will also be drunk from you.
See you in the next article!
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About Moffat
Sage (Wiseman) • Bestselling Author
Unlock the secrets of ancient wisdom interwoven with modern psychology. Moffat Machingura, bestselling author and acclaimed Sage, guides over 100,000 readers on journeys of self-improvement, finding love, keeping relationships running, and healing wounded souls.
He is your guide to personal transformation, helping you make-over your life and build joyful love relationships. Are you ready to unlock your own wisdom and rewrite your life and love story?
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