In the lead-up to my wedding last year, my fiancé, Joe, and I were determined to keep things chill. The point of a wedding, in our view, was not to construct a perfect fairy tale but to do what was necessary to corral our friends and family in one place and show them a good time. And, you know, bind ourselves together for life. Still, despite how often Joe muttered “stress-free, stress-free” during any wedding-planning discussion, some stress did worm its way in. The sheer number of tasks involved, even for a small reception, can be overwhelming.
But soon after we set our wedding date, a remarkable thing started to happen: Even before Joe and I could think to ask for help, offers poured in from our family and friends. We received offers both specific (“I’d love to help plan the bachelorette”) and general (“Let me know if you need anything!”). The help was more than welcome, and made us feel loved. As grateful as I was, though, I also felt strangely uncomfortable with handing off tasks. I sometimes worried that I was asking too much of a friend (even if I wasn’t really asking; they were offering). I wondered if we should pay for a wedding planner, rather than “imposing” on our relationships.
We ultimately took many people up on their offers, sometimes unable to stop ourselves from adding “Are you sure?” The result was that, in a way that no other moment of my life has so far, our wedding revealed just how much support we have in our community. It also highlighted for me the complicated relationship many people have with offering, asking for, and accepting help.
A reluctance to aid and be aided, research suggests, stems from assumptions about how other people will feel—assumptions that are not necessarily accurate. A 2008 study found that people who need help tend to predict that others will be far more likely to say no to a request than they actually are—they underestimated the likelihood of getting help by as much as 50 percent. In a different, observational study of helping and gratitude in eight societies on five continents, 88 percent of help requests were fulfilled, which suggests that the chances of getting a “yes” are extremely high across cultures.
People also tend to overestimate how inconvenient the helper will find the request and underestimate how happy helping will make them, one study found. Xuan Zhao, a Stanford University social psychologist who worked on that study, sees herself in her research. She remembered a time when she was visiting a friend who lives maybe a 10-minute drive away from her, and her friend offered to give her a ride home. “I was like, ‘No, no, no, don’t worry, I’ll get an Uber,” she told me. “It’s almost a reflexive reaction. No, I don’t want to bother you. No, that sounds like too much trouble.” This was her response even though she knows that if their roles were reversed, she wouldn’t be bothered at all by a short drive to drop a friend off.
Helping other people makes you feel good: This is a truism that research backs up. Yet for some reason, many people find that harder to believe when they’re the ones receiving the help. Joe and I found our loved ones were eager (sometimes bordering on pushy) with their offers, and they did their jobs smilingly. Unless they’re incredibly good liars, they really did seem to enjoy helping with the wedding.
When people do hold themselves back from offering assistance, the reason may not necessarily be that they don’t want to help. They may be afraid that their overture will be unwelcome. They may assume, as one study found, that if people want help, they’ll ask for it—which discounts all the mental barriers to asking. In another study, participants suspected that their offers of support would make recipients feel more awkward and less happy than they actually did. Would-be helpers, that study suggested, can be overly worried about saying and doing the right thing, and fear that others might judge them for using the wrong words, or for offering support that wouldn’t actually fix the problem. The recipients, however, thought more about warmth—how kind and genuine the support was, not how elegantly the offer was phrased or how perfectly it would meet their needs. Everyone is out here trying to read minds, and doing a bad job of it.
American culture, with its emphasis on self-reliance, can make asking for help especially difficult. A 2011 study comparing students at large universities in the United States and China found that the Americans were less likely than Chinese students to expect people to be willing to help them if asked; its authors suggested that the individualistic culture of the U.S., as opposed to China’s more collectivist culture, has something to do with that. But going it alone because you think you should be a cowboy, or because you don’t want to be a burden, can, in a way, take an opportunity for happiness from your loved ones. “We all like to feel like good, kind, effective people,” Vanessa Bohns, a Cornell University organizational-behavior professor who worked on the study, told me in an email. “When we are looking onto an event from the sidelines, we don’t get to feel any of those things.”
An important event, such as a wedding, removes some of the obstacles to giving or receiving help. “In the big moments in life—weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby—there is no question that people need help,” Bohns said. A person’s offer of assistance in these situations is unlikely to be taken the wrong way, she told me, so people are not only more likely to offer help but also “to do so more assertively.” Likewise, these are moments when people may feel more comfortable than usual asking for help because no one will be surprised that they need it.
Zhao told me that she’s always wanted to study the “magic of occasions”: how big moments seem to give people permission to do things they might not ordinarily do, such as asking your loved ones for medium- to large-size favors. My parents came to D.C., where I live, a week before our wedding to help run errands. Joe’s family made the flower arrangements with a large haul of blooms from Trader Joe’s (no relation). Friends planned my bachelorette party, decorated the wedding venue for us, served as ushers, manned the sound system, and set up our morning-after brunch. Even my hairstylist chipped in: I mentioned while getting some highlights that I was looking to rent plants to decorate our venue, and she told me we could borrow the salon’s plants for free. We did, and saved some money. My sisters’ boyfriends were the ones who carried the plants to the venue and back—yet more help.
We could have instead paid someone to do all of those tasks. Lord knows the wedding industry is eager to sell you a solution to any need, real or invented. But it isn’t just the wedding industry. Modern life is replete with chances to either rely on relationships or buy your way out of a problem. Why ask a friend to drive you to the airport when you can just take an Uber? Why borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor when you can get your own bag of it Doordashed to you?
One obvious reason to ask for help is if you can’t easily afford to pay for a cab or a delivery service. Emphasizing the link between social capital and regular old financial capital, some research suggests that lower-income people with stronger support networks experience less material hardship than lower-income people with fewer connections. The absence of money makes relying on one another more necessary and increases the costs of not doing so. But even if you have money, spending it doesn’t replace the value of helping and being helped. Borrowing something is not only cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new thing; it can also deepen your connection to the person you’re borrowing from.
When Joe and I stood at the altar on our wedding day, our officiant (a friend, naturally) asked us to pause, take a deep breath, and look out at the audience. Stopping to take in the sight of our loved ones, many of whom had contributed to making the day possible, reminded me why we had wanted a wedding in the first place: to celebrate with our community. Pushing through discomfort to accept the help that was offered, and ask for more, made our wedding feel less like a product we had purchased and more like something special that we had created with our friends, family, and neighbors.
My husband and I are rich in relationships, and our wedding made that clearer than ever. I know that we are fortunate to have had this much help, and not everyone has access to support in such abundance. But I also think that many people probably have more help available to them than they think, and that the very act of asking for it could make their relationships stronger. That feels like a lesson worth bringing into everyday life, rather than waiting until the next milestone to pay the feeling forward.
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