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If you are thirsty and want to drink water, ask for a cup of water. Or grab a glass, and pour yourself a cup.
Don't sit around thirsty, blaming others for your misery, hating them for not reading your mind, for not somehow luckily giving you what you want without you assertively asking for it.
Unassertive communication comes in many forms but generally all are toxic, unfair, and unhealthy.
Assertiveness is not aggressiveness.
And aggression is generally a symptom of unassertiveness.
Whether it comes out as passive-aggressiveness or flat-out aggression, or even violence, if you sit there long enough thirsty, wrongfully blaming others for your own failure to take assertive self-responsibility, you will almost certainly ultimately lash out in one way or another.
And it's easy to overlook how we enable this unhealthy toxic behavior in others, to be an enabler. You can run around exhausting yourself giving people water they didn't ask for, many of whom probably aren't even thirsty and secretly have other desires regarding which they resent you because you didn't mind-read it out of their heads. Many of those that you would bend over backwards attempting to please will resent you for giving them useless water that they don't want and didn't ask for. By enabling their toxic unassertiveness, you will often also thereby make the same mistake they did. You'll expect gratitude that you won't get. In fact, you'll almost certainly often eventually get the exact opposite of gratitude, because most of us, including myself, are not nearly as good at mind-reading as we typically think. And frankly your enabling will do the exact opposite of helping them. Instead of quenching their thirst with water, you will drown them with your toxic enabling of their toxic unassertiveness. Don't force yourself to say "no" to people asking for something because you are too busy shoving it down throat of someone who didn't ask for it.
If you are truly giving out of unconditional love, it isn't done with the condition or expectation of gratitude, or any future-oriented condition or expectation. It is done because it makes you feel good in the present when it is done. It's done because it's what you want and what you choose to do. Love is not sacrificing your own happiness for someone else; love is being happy to sacrifice. In that beautiful but rare case, you become like the nurturing love-filled little child who gives her toy doll imaginary tea, and rocks the doll to bed at night, with no expectation of rewards for yourself outside the present, no expectation that the doll will give you gratitude now or ever. No expectation that the doll will return the favor. I'm not saying love people in all their complex conscious glory only as much as you love lifeless dolls, but I am saying love people at least as much as you love dolls because sadly many of us don't seem to.
If you don't get the gratitude you are looking for, it would be your fault much more than theirs, insofar as fault or blame have any real meaning, insofar as anyone is to blame or at fault at all for anything.
Indeed, as my upcoming book, "In It Together", will explain much better than a single little forum could (and even a relatively long forum post is short compared to a book that I literally spent years working on), when we fully understand and accept what I am getting at with this post and line of reasoning, there is no real meaning in blame or fault. When it comes to our choices, we each get exactly what we want, meaning what we choose.
The irony of self-responsibility and spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) is that really it is there whether you accept it or not. You are always responsible for yourself. You are always in complete and total control of your choices, even if we use the illusion of 'shoulds' and 'oughts' to distract ourselves from our own present cans and cannots, and our present dos and do nots, meaning our choices in the present.
We can sit around claiming we want to drink the water that is available to drink while not drinking it and resentfully blaming others for not magically reading our minds and shoving it down our throat for us, while saying, "they should be doing such and such instead of what they are actually doing".
Yes, we can sit around claiming we want it, while blabbering silently in our own heads about imaginary 'shoulds' and 'oughts', words that are at best meaningless. "We should be doing this; they should be doing that…"
Yes, we can claim we want it.
But actions speak infinitely louder than words.
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Besides, I agree with [almost] everything you said! 
