We often conflate wants with needs. What I mean by this is that needs are things that are necessary for our literal survival. Things like shelter, food, drinkable water, social connection. The kinds of shelter, food, drink, or social connections we prefer are wants. We don’t need strawberries to survive for example but we do need foods with Vitamin C.
We do this especially within our human relationships and most prominently in our romantic/sexual ones. It is true humans are social animals and for us to thrive we need connection - physical, emotional, and intellectual. We have a need to be seen, heard, and understood. The older we become the less we need any of this for actual survival, and still we need them to thrive and live relatively fulfilling and happy lives.
But what we confuse here is that we “need” any or all of these things from a specific person. We don’t need it from any one person we have chosen - we Want it from that specific person. I don’t need physical affection from my current lover, for example. I need physical affection from someone and I want it from my current lover.
When we conflate needs and wants in our human relationships we start to disregard the boundaries, wants, and needs of others and prioritize our own wants and needs above all else. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t prioritize our wants and needs - of course we should! AND we can’t demand any specific person meet or provide them.
I had a comet relationship that I had a lot of wants around, and for a variety of reasons it was not possible for those wants to be fulfilled in that relationship by that person. I could wish and long and crave that that specific person meet/provide them til the cows come home, but it’s not actually that person’s responsibility to provide any of it, ever. It is my responsibility as an adult to get my needs and wants met - meaning I need a community of people and a variety of relationships to to be able to do this. It means I need to respect boundaries and the limited capacity of others. It means I need to do the work of healing my childhood wounds and not project unrealistic expectations on others. It means I need to engage my own agency to both get my needs met and determine if certain relationships are still nurturing or nourishing in some ways or if they have reached their expiration dates and act accordingly.
Yes we all have needs. And yes many of them are relational and need to be met in relationship. However we can neither force nor expect any specific person to meet all, or any of our needs. In order for us to have nurturing and nourishing relationships we need to do our own emotional maturation work and build a variety of relationships, let go of expectations and stop demanding that specific people always provide certain things, when they either can’t or simply don’t want to.
This is a path to change. Our relationships, all relationships, are the foundations we build our communities and societies on. If we want change in the greater world we need to be willing to do the often challenging and uncomfortable work of creating change in our smaller outer and our greater inner worlds. This is intergenerational work, this is ancestral healing, this is revolution and evolution.
This essay was originally published on Insta in April 2023. It has been revised for publication here.
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Recent essays on Embodied Relating:
What’s this? : A Random List o Tings
Being present in relationship : Revision of a short essay from April 2021
EWP 04 : Asking, wants, & pleasure - Embodied Writing Pleasure series
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