While some things in life are considered essential, like food, water and shelter. Are you able to separate relationship wants versus needs? As human beings, our unwavering desire for ‘more’ transforms what we need to survive into all the things we want to have instead.
Most of us are hungry for intimacy, however, because we also have had flawed childhoods and imperfect role models, we end up with somewhat of an aversion to it. Many times people will desperately want intimacy in relationships, and not realize that because of their experiences in life, they have developed an allergy to it. They end up blaming their spouse or partner for not getting their needs met. This actually locks the relationship in anxiety and resentment enabling the aversion to intimacy to remain protected. Intimacy is created when each individual in the relationship is free to be loved and give love without expectations and demands. Since for the most part, the expectations and demands believed to be necessary, were necessary to be met in your childhood, and likely weren’t, therefore you are seeking for them to be met now by your spouse. The perception of “need” begins with a rise in emotional intensity—you feel more strongly about doing this or having that. As the intensity increases, it can feel like you “need” to do or have it, for one compelling reason: It’s the same emotional process as biological need. When emotion suddenly rises, your brain confuses preferences and desires with biological needs.
The best chance of finding freely-given love in a safe relationship is to approach it from desire, not emotional need.
“Freedom to love” is a key phrase. To be free to do something, we must be free not to do it. We are free to love only to the extent that we aren’t forced into it in vain attempts to relieve guilt, shame, or fear of abandonment or by misguided efforts to make up for past mistakes or, worst of all, by misinterpreting vulnerable feelings as signals of emotional need.
An emotional need is a preference or desire that you’ve decided must be gratified to maintain equilibrium, that is, you can’t be well or feel whole so long as your needs are not being met.
You don’t normally feel anything about breathing, until you have difficulty doing it. At that point, emotional intensity spikes to signal imminent survival threat. Similarly, you normally don’t feel anything when your partner is working on his computer. But if you speak to him, and he seems to ignore you, your emotional intensity is likely to increase, until the desire for his attention seems to be a need for it. Instead of trying to engage your partner’s interest because you desire it, you’ll demand it, because you “need” it or punish him for failing to meet your needs. Now which do you think is more likely to get you the kind of attention you most desire from a loved one, showing interest in him or demanding that he “meet your needs?”
The habit of interpreting preferences and desires as “needs” vastly distorts subjective experience.
This self-perpetuating feature of the perception of need is predominantly unconscious. The way it gathers conscious strength is by falsely explaining negative experience. For example, if I perceive myself to have emotional needs, and I feel bad in any way for any reason, it’s because my needs aren’t being met. It doesn’t matter that I’m tired, not exercising, bored, ineffective at work, or stressed from the commute or the declining stock market, or, most important, whether I’m mistreating you or otherwise violating my deeper values; the reason I feel bad is that you’re not meeting my needs.
Once the brain becomes convinced that it needs something, pursuit of it can easily become obsessive, compulsive, or addictive. In terms of motivation, perceived emotional needs are quite similar to addictions.
While the body contributes on a cellular level to addiction, the mind decides exclusively that we have an emotional need. The feeling can become so powerful that it makes us believe we have holes within us that someone else must fill. That’s a tragic—and false—assumption that almost always leads to relationships that go bad, affairs, and ultimately divorce.
No matter how seductive “I need you,” may sound in popular songs, the partner who “needs” you cannot freely love you. Most of the painful conflicts of intimate relationships begin with one partner making an emotional request—motivated by a perceived “need”—that the other, motivated by a different “need,” regards as a demand. This is the classic relationship dynamic known as demand-withdraw: The more one partner demands, the less the other can give; the more one pleads, the farther away the other retreats. Both feel like victims. Indeed, any disagreement can feel like abuse when the perceived “need” of one to be validated crashes headlong into the “need” of the other not to feel manipulated.
As long as they perceive themselves to have emotional needs that their partners must gratify, their desire to love is reduced to “getting my needs met,” which the partner perceives as, “I have to give up who I am to meet your needs.”
The best way to avoid this kind of entanglement that leads almost inevitably to some form of intimate betrayal is to build relationships on desire to create an environment in your relationship that promotes true intimacy rather than demands to meet perceived emotional needs.
A basic rule to determine if you are confusing needs and desires is to ask yourself how often your thoughts turn to, “if he/she would change and meet my needs, I would be happy or fulfilled”. Anytime your focus is on another person’s behavior or lack of behaviors, it is a clue that you, as an individual, need to work on yourself. The more you focus on yourself, learning how to create intimacy in your relationship by your own thoughts and actions, rather than changing your partners, the closer you will get to what you truly desire.
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