Being Needed vs. Being Loved

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Whether there wasn’t enough love available during childhood, or you witnessed one parent needing the other, or you didn’t believe you deserved love, many intimate relationships have one person settling for being needed. I’m unsure if it happens with some awareness or is a completely unconscious dynamic. There may be some inherent confusion about the difference between being needed and being loved. They certainly are not mutually exclusive. That is, someone could be both needed and loved. However, my professional experience reveals that being needed is the predominant pattern, and it actually replaces being loved.

Let’s examine some salient distinctions contrasting these two ways of relating more closely. Our exploration will focus on the person in the role of being needed or loved rather than on the person doing the needing or loving.

Being Needed - When we are needed, there is an implication that we must prove that we are a worthy resource. This can be riddled with anxiety as we worry if we have all the right stuff, and it can be exhausting.

Being Loved – When we are authentically loved, we should not need to demonstrate that we have the right stuff. Instead, there should be a feeling of acceptance and a warm regard with nothing to prove.

Being Needed – We can easily slip into colluding with a partner’s dependency rather than championing their inner authority and independence.

Being Loved – We are less likely to invest in the one who loves us being disempowered. Their inner authority easily translates into a deepening of their love for us with more meaning becoming available for creating genuine emotional intimacy.

Being Needed – When being needed is a dominant pattern in the relationship, we are more likely to fall prey to the delusion that we can save someone.

Being Loved – We are less easily seduced into thinking we can save others. With minimal emotional intelligence, we live in the truth that we can only save ourselves.

Being Needed – A relationship becomes more non-mutual with less of an equal flow of support, compassion, warmth, and attention. We run a higher risk of feeling resentful, empty, and burned out.

Being Loved – A relationship is more likely to be balanced with both people giving and receiving. It is viewed as a place to make offerings and to meet our own needs. The relationship is easily seen as a place for growth and renewal.

Being Needed – We can easily become counter-dependent with an increased need to be depended upon. The process typically includes moving the locus of our worth from ourselves to the one depending upon us. There is an attractive illusion that because our deliveries are needed, we have more control over keeping someone connected to us and allegedly not being forgotten.

Being Loved – A maturing love of the self holds an understanding that no one can love us the way we can love ourselves. We can remain grateful for the love given to us by the other, courageously holding the knowing that we cannot control being loved.

Being Needed – Our identity can easily be translated into being a delivery system, reduced to a functionary rather than a whole person. It can lead us to forget who we are beyond our deliveries, and those who depend upon us forget who we are. There can be a profound loss of being known.

Being Loved – Our identity can be expressed and lived as reflections of our longing, loves, sorrows, needs, and gifts. We can rejoice in being known beyond the tasks we perform.

Being Needed – It’s all too easy to see ourselves as having no needs as we meet the needs of others. This constitutes a breach of our humanity. As we distance from the core of our humanity, we settle into mediocrity, emptiness, resentment, and often cynicism.

Being Loved – We allow ourselves to be entitled to have needs, especially emotional needs, such as being seen, heard, encouraged, loved, chosen, remembered, held and appreciated. We can live in the warm embrace of our humanity.

Being Needed – Because of the lack of mutuality, emotional intimacy is impossible. Typically, the loss of emotional intimacy leaves folks feeling profoundly wanting. Such a wanting often morphs into having an affair in the hope of finding that missing something.

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Being Loved – Love sets the stage for mutual support regarding emotional needs. That, together with the expression of truth accompanied by compassion, easily allows for deepening emotional intimacy. Truth can be understood as the genuine expression of emotion and desire guided by kindness.

Love can replace need as the fundamental dynamic in a committed relationship. This means that someone needs to learn to let go of feeling valued by being excessively dependent and learn to be loved rather than depended upon.