In couples, in families and among friends, I have run into the following phenomenon again and again.
Whenever there is a person in the world who is devoted, diligent, empathetic, loving, attentive and extreme in the degree to which they take responsibility, there attaches to them almost immediately — as though by magic — somebody self-absorbed who drains them, leans on them entirely, and criticises them from every direction while doing it.
You could put that down to karma and move on. I would rather explain it, because it is not luck and it is not a curse, and because the mechanism tells you what to do about it.
A person who takes extreme responsibility is, functionally, a person who absorbs. When something goes wrong in their vicinity, they handle it. When something is left undone, they do it. When somebody is unhappy, they treat it as a problem addressed to them.
That is an extraordinarily valuable trait, and it is also a standing offer. Not a deliberate one — but an offer nonetheless, legible to anybody looking for one, and requiring no negotiation to accept.
The self-absorbed do not seek out the devoted because they are cruel strategists. They simply drift, as water does, to the place where the resistance is lowest. And they stay because nothing ever makes staying expensive.
The criticism is the part people find hardest to understand, and it is the most predictable feature of the whole arrangement. Somebody who is receiving a great deal and giving nothing has to account for that imbalance somehow, and the cheapest available account is that the other person is deficient — that whatever is being given, it is not quite right, and therefore no debt has been incurred.
So no, it is not karma. It is that a boundless capacity to give, offered without any conditions at all, selects with terrible efficiency for the people least worth giving to.
The remedy is not to give less. It is to notice, considerably earlier than you currently do, who is reciprocating.