The first Thanksgiving I hosted, I was 34 years old. My mother had died the year before, and somehow the responsibility of continuing the tradition fell to me. I didn’t question it. Nobody asked if I wanted to do it. It was simply assumed that I had the space, the willingness, the capacity to handle it. I had a wife, a house big enough, and apparently the kind of personality that made people assume I enjoyed cooking for eighteen people.

I did it because it seemed like what you did. You inherited traditions. You maintained them. You performed them. Year after year, I would start planning in September. By October, I’d be researching new recipes, adjusting seating arrangements, figuring out how to manage the fact that my brother and my cousin couldn’t be in the same room without tension. I’d spend the day of Thanksgiving in my kitchen, stressed and resentful, serving people who had never once thanked me for it or offered to help beyond showing up with a store-bought pie.

What’s fascinating to me now, looking back with the clarity that comes from finally stopping, is how much of my identity got wrapped up in being the person who hosted. It was a role that made me feel necessary. In a life where I often felt peripheral—a middle child, a corporate worker, a man who’d never quite achieved the professional success I’d imagined—hosting Thanksgiving was something I was unquestionably good at. Or at least, I was reliably present and committed to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about obligation and love, and I think they get dangerously confused in family systems. We’re taught that love means showing up, that it means sacrifice, that it means doing the things that need to be done regardless of the cost to ourselves. And some of that is true. Love does require sacrifice sometimes. But I think there’s a particular kind of damage that happens when we conflate obligation with love, when we start believing that doing things resentfully is somehow noble because we’re doing them at all.

Thirty-five years is a long time to do something you’re ambivalent about. It’s long enough that everyone involved develops a fundamental assumption that this is your role in the family ecosystem. You are the person who hosts Thanksgiving. You are reliable. You are constant. You are, in some sense, responsible for maintaining the family’s emotional and practical cohesion through an annual ritual that, when you actually examine it, isn’t bringing anyone particular joy—least of all you.

The year I stopped, I didn’t announce it dramatically. I didn’t write a letter explaining my reasoning or my resentment. I just didn’t start planning in September. I didn’t email people asking about dietary restrictions or preferences. I didn’t do any of the preliminary work that had become invisible to everyone except me. And nobody asked. That’s the part that struck me the most. I stopped doing it, and the silence was deafening precisely because it wasn’t actually silent. Nobody called to ask what was happening. Nobody suggested an alternative. Nobody expressed gratitude for the thirty-five years or disappointment about the year I wasn’t going to do it.

What the silence told me was something I’d suspected but never fully allowed myself to know: they didn’t love Thanksgiving because I was hosting it. They loved Thanksgiving despite the obligation I felt. They loved Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is a thing people love. I’d convinced myself that my sacrifice was what made it special, but actually my sacrifice was invisible to them. They were just enjoying a meal that appeared in front of them, with no awareness of the cost to the person who made it happen.

This connects to something important about self-determination theory and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When you’re doing something out of genuine care and desire to connect, it activates parts of your brain that are associated with wellbeing and satisfaction. But when you’re doing something out of obligation, out of a sense that you should or must, even if you’re dressed it up in the language of love, it activates different circuitry—the parts associated with depletion and resentment. I’d spent thirty-five years stimulating my depletion circuitry and calling it love.

The question I had to sit with was whether I actually wanted to host Thanksgiving. And the honest answer was no. I hadn’t wanted to for years. What I’d wanted was for someone to notice how much I didn’t want to, and for someone to tell me I didn’t have to. What I’d wanted was for my sense of obligation to be respected, for my sacrifice to be acknowledged, for the family to understand that I was doing this despite my own preference, not because of it.

But that’s not how obligations work. If you need gratitude for your sacrifice, then it wasn’t actually love. It was a transaction. And I’d been engaged in a transaction for thirty-five years without ever acknowledging it. I was offering my time and energy in exchange for the feeling of being necessary. And the family was accepting that trade without realizing they were trading anything at all.

The first year I didn’t host, one of my siblings suggested we all go to a restaurant. The idea was floated casually, without any recognition that we were abandoning a thirty-five-year tradition. And you know what? That restaurant Thanksgiving was actually lovely. People were more relaxed. There were no dishes to wash. Nobody was running around stressed. We actually talked to each other instead of assembling around a table laden with food that required someone to have spent the previous week in a state of low-grade panic.

Since then, we’ve alternated. Sometimes we go out. Sometimes my sister hosts, and I notice now—with sharp clarity—how much work she’s doing, how much of her stress goes unacknowledged, how much she’s probably waiting for someone to recognize her sacrifice. But I don’t say anything about it unless she complains first. That’s the thing about finally stopping something you never wanted to do—you become aware of how common this dynamic is. How many people are doing things they resent out of a sense of obligation they’ve never questioned.

What I’ve learned about the relationship between obligation and love is that they’re not actually connected. Real love exists independent of obligation. Real love doesn’t require you to resentfully cook for eighteen people. Real love can look like stepping back and letting someone else take the reins, or letting the tradition transform into something different, or choosing to spend a holiday doing something you actually want to do. The obligation I felt was never about love. It was about my need to matter, to be necessary, to have my worth measured by how much I gave up.

I think about how one child often ends up doing all the caregiving in aging families, and I wonder how many of them are doing it out of genuine love versus out of obligation that never gets examined. I wonder how many people are slowly dying under the weight of traditions that have become anchors instead of celebrations.

The most surprising thing that happened after I stopped hosting is that I started actually liking Thanksgiving again. When I wasn’t responsible for its execution, I could enjoy it. I could relax. I could participate in conversations instead of mentally calculating cooking times. I could see my family instead of seeing obstacles to a dinner timeline. And ironically, I liked them more too, because I wasn’t resenting them for expecting things from me that I’d never explicitly said I wanted to give.

The silence that followed my stopping was eventually broken, but not in the way I expected. It wasn’t broken with gratitude for the thirty-five years or apologies for taking my effort for granted. It was broken with the simple reality that life went on. The tradition continued without me, which meant it was never really about me at all. I was just the person who happened to be willing to do the work for thirty-five years. And that, strangely, is a freeing thing to understand. I mattered less than I thought, which meant I could stop trying to matter through sacrifice.

What obligation teaches you, if you’re willing to listen to its silence, is that it was never love in the first place. Love is lighter than that. Love doesn’t require your depletion to be real. Love is something you do because you want to, not because you have to, and if you can’t find that want in yourself, then maybe the thing that needs to change isn’t your willingness—it’s your honesty about what you actually feel.