The Host

You keep the connective tissue of a group intact. You remember who is going through what, you organise the thing that would not otherwise happen, you make sure the person on the edge of the circle gets spoken to. It is real work and it is invisible by design, since the whole point is that it looks like the group is simply close. Most social structures that survive have someone doing this, and often it is one person.

The trouble is that you measure yourself by how everyone else is doing, which hands your equilibrium to other people. Disapproval — even from someone whose opinion should not carry weight — lands harder than it should, and you will adjust yourself to remove it before asking whether it was fair. You also give in a currency you would like returned, and when it is not, the resentment has nowhere to go because you never presented it as an exchange. Saying plainly what you want is not a failure of generosity; it is the only way anyone can actually give it to you.