Love And/Or Need

• February 13, 2007
• Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.
• no comments

Today, I want to draw a distinction. It is a simple one, but one that is crucial for the success of marriage.

Here it is: Someone can love you, and not meet your needs. You can love someone and not meet their needs.

And here is what I mean: when we have a need and it is not met, we can come to believe that we are not loved by that person. For example, I had a client tell me about an interaction the other night. Her husband had given her some “early Valentine” flowers. He was showing he loved her. Later that night, they were watching a TV show, and she wanted to tell him about something emotional. Instead of listening, he stated he wanted to watch what was on TV. Naturally, she felt hurt. Her reaction was to throw the flowers out the door and into the cold night.

The symbolism is clear: the flowers meant he loved her, but when she didn’t feel loved, she threw out the symbol. But his not meeting her need to be heard was not the same as him not loving her. He simply failed to address her needs at that point.

When we fail to remember this distinction, we translate our hurt feelings (and feelings are always hurt when a need is not met) into feeling unloved. While this may seem like an obvious jump, it is one I see over and over.

But it is indeed possible for someone to love me and not to meet my needs. Proof? I do it to other people all the time. My wife has needs that I miss; my kids have needs that I fail to address. But that does not mean that I don’t love them. It merely means I am human, and I will sometimes fail to meet someone else’s needs.

In our heads, we think of marriage as finding a beautiful/handsome, accepting, loving and nurturing person to love us, warts, failures, and all. In other words, we want someone to meet our needs perfectly, but can’t do that ourselves. True love is working to meet the other person’s needs, knowing that sometimes the other person will not meet our needs. Problems come when we decide to not meet our spouse’s needs because our needs are not met.

Seek first to meet your spouse’s needs, and understand when your spouse fails to meet yours.

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