The person asked to be patient may be funding everyone else’s comfort with their own delay.

Waiting has a price, and someone is paying it. When one person is asked to be patient, the delay usually buys ease for everybody else, and because patience is framed as a virtue the transfer never appears as a cost at all. The request sounds like a request for character when it is a request for a subsidy.

So ask who benefits from the delay and what it is costing the person absorbing it. If you are the one asking, name the cost out loud and say when it ends. And if you have been patient for a long time about something that keeps not happening, you are allowed to say that the waiting has become the answer.