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Relationships
The Harmful Myth About Needing to Be Loved
Why our longing for love is wisdom, not weakness.
Posted August 6, 2018 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Of all the harmful myths we’re fed about dating and love, one of the most insidious is the belief that intense longing for love is a weakness—that we should be content whether single or coupled. For some of us, this may be true. For the rest of us, it's a debilitating falsehood.
In my opinion, longing for love is not weakness. It’s wisdom. Numbing our loneliness is a path to a despair that plagues our culture. We are not meant to be alone and self-sufficient. Without lives filled with love, we wither inside. Intimacy is oxygen. We don’t need to transcend our hunger for love; we need to learn to honor it.
In many ways, science backs this up. Eli Finkel, one of the most respected researchers in the field of relationships and attraction, states that the quality of your intimate relationship affects your happiness twice as much as your career, your friendships, or even your health: Simply holding a loved one’s hand lowers blood pressure and reduces pain.
The feeling of a deep, aching need for love has been given a bad rap. We’re taught that need is a cringe-worthy emotion, a source of shame. It’s important to remember that there's a distinction between need and neediness. Neediness comes from trying to suppress or transcend our authentic feelings of need. And that never works. In the end, our suppressed needs come out in a form that’s manipulative, punishing, or passive aggressive. The intense drive toward connection is a gift. It's a healthy and essential part of our humanity. When we suppress our needs, they fight back: Needs suppressed become neediness.
Or, perhaps worse, our needs get pushed down so far that we lose access to them, and we become isolated and disconnected from our humanity.
In my decades as a psychotherapist specializing in the wiser search for love, I’ve found that the people who most intensely long for intimacy are the ones most likely to find it. Love—both the finding of it and the sustaining of it–takes hard work. All of us, single or coupled, fall into patterns of complacency. It’s those of us who care most about connection who are willing to do that work. It's hard to break free from the gravity zone of comfortable avoidance and reach out for deeper intimacy. The more we long for connection, the more driven we are to find it.
For this reason, I invite my clients to see their longing as a gift, not a liability. It is those of us who experience the often-painful urgency of love who are willing to do the real work of intimacy.
It can be hard to dignify our needs, especially when we have felt ashamed of our "neediness" in the past. The answer often lies in a type of communication which takes time and practice to develop. Try this three-step process the next time you’re experiencing a sense of need in a relationship:
First and foremost, begin by accepting, and dignifying your sense of need. Try to validate it. Finish the following sentence for yourself: “It makes sense that I feel this need because…” For example, “It makes sense that I am feeling needy for affection and validation, because I really like this guy. We just saw our third movie together, and for the first time, we didn’t hold hands. Even after I took his hand, he seemed to find an excuse to pull away after just a few moments. So it makes sense that I’m feeling a need for validation.”
Second, without invalidating your experience and feelings, try to imagine the perspective of the person you’re with. For example, “He’s been pretty consistently affectionate with me, so I probably shouldn’t over-worry here. Now that I think of it, he also seemed kind of preoccupied during dinner. I wonder what might be going on with him."
Bringing compassion to both parties—always beginning by dignifying your own feelings of need, and then reflecting on the experience of your partner—creates an environment that’s much more likely to lead to deeper intimacy. When we begin by shaming ourselves for our needs, it almost always ends badly. And unfortunately, our cultural fixation with appearing cool and confident teaches us to feel ashamed of any deep feelings of need.
The third step evolves out of the first two. Once we’ve taken the first two steps, we reflect on how we’d like to act. This takes some reflection and it’s often immensely helpful to ask a friend for advice. Just be sure it’s a friend who won’t shame you for your “neediness.” This is a very personal step. For example, with ample reflection, one person might decide to say nothing and just wait to see how things progress. Another might ask a date if everything is OK, noting that he or she seemed preoccupied at dinner. For someone else, it might feel right to say that they noticed his or her date didn’t want to hold hands, and ask if everything was alright. The main point is that in each case, the person dignified instead of denigrated his or her needs, and spoke in a way that was kind.
Often, it’s the people who care the most deeply about connection who are most hurt when the sense of connection is damaged. These are often the people who most easily feel that something is wrong with them because they are so sensitive to the nuances of connection. In my experience, it is those very people who are often most capable of deep intimacy once they learn to dignify their sensitivity and their need for bonding.
Learning to honor your needs instead of suppressing them can lead to a richer, happier life. Those hard-work changes are at the heart of a life that's filled with love.
