Needs in Relationship

Relationships get sticky when we try to bring the depletion and need of the self into the connection, leveraging the obligation the other feels to serve us and “our needs.”

We approach the relationship as if how we feel about and within ourselves IS how we feel about the other, or has something to do with how the other feels about us. Then we ask that the relationship serve "the connection" aka my experience of the connection aka my experience of my entire life.

Connection is how we know each other, and the way we feel bonded, unified, similar, or in love.

Relationship is the set of practices which arise around connection to honor and serve connection's presence and deepening.

Relationship is the practice of commitment to and investment in connection.

You are connected to all your blood relatives, for example. But your relationship with each relative looks different, and possibly some of them are "no relationship," where you engage in no activities of presence or communication with them.

Anyone who has gone no-contact knows this, sadly, cannot sever the connection.

In our current cultural landscape, romantic partnership seems to exist to meet a whole host of needs. This is not because a romantic partner can or should serve all these needs, but because our modern society has provided for our experience of deep depletion and the presence of many connection-needs.

It’s time to bust the lie that relationships exist to get our needs met.

Relationships exist because they must. They have to. Relationships exist because distinction exists, because we are in a body. They exist for our fun and because we are all stuck here together, interdependent whether we like it or not.

We evolved to have a village full of elders and peers and children. We were meant to look in 40 pairs of eyes each day. Romantic relationship is a tiny island lighthouse in a vast sea of dysfunctional society and resultant loneliness.

But still we do not have needs of relationship.

The proof of this is that people end relationships when all their needs aren't getting met. People end relationships which are meeting some of their "needs."

How insane is that?

If any of the needs the relationship meets are truly needs, you cannot afford to let that relationship go. So, what we see immediately is that the "needs" we have in relationship are not needs for our survival, but needs that serve our willingness to be in partnership with this particular person in this particular moment.

I don't NEED you to look me in the eyes every day. I'll survive without that. But in order for me to want to be in partnership with you, I NEED you to look me in the eyes every day. I need you to want that, not just to DO it.

I as a human don't need it! I only need it in order to want to be in partnership with you. You only need to want that if you care to have me want to be in partnership with you.