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Key points
- Too much neediness can dampen a relationship.
- Love is often there even when sex isn’t.
- Empathizing with your partner improves your connection.
- Patience is indeed a virtue when it comes to sex.
There’s a difference between need and neediness. We all “need” love, and to look for it is natural. We join Match, we go to bars. We smile at someone to whom we’re attracted and hope that one thing leads to something more. Okay, fine.
But neediness, an exaggerated—distorted—form of need, has the opposite effect to that which we intend. It can scare people, make them wonder whether we’d pile too many demands onto their time, their capacity to empathize, or simply their image of themselves as an independent actor not tied down to someone with deficient personal resources.
Thus, obvious neediness is an instant turn-off. It can short-circuit a relationship before it even starts. Who, without pre-existing obligations to us, would let us substitute our needs for theirs? So, the problem is how to curtail neediness in practice and, more fundamentally, how to determine its causes and address them.
I became concerned about the effects of neediness during a session with my patient Dan. Dan reported that he’d been depressed. When I asked what the matter was, he said that his girlfriend wouldn’t have sex with him. “We’ve stopped connecting,” he sighed.
But relationships don’t usually experience a sudden phase change, like ice suddenly becoming vapor. I suspected that the problem might be in Dan’s expectations: Was his girlfriend avoiding him or, more likely, was he upping the ante on expectations that she was not prepared to fulfill? In other words, was he displaying a degree of neediness that forced her into (sexual) retreat?
As often happens in relationships, sex becomes the flash point for a whole lot of issues that have gone unresolved. It becomes the singular marker of whether one partner feels too emotionally burdened to respond in the usual, loving, uninhibited way that the other partner would normally expect. If the withdrawal hardens into a pattern, then sex can become the desideratum of whether a person feels loved or not. In Dan’s case, it seemed that without sex, he felt that the love had gone out of his relationship.
I asked Dan what was going on, and he explained that his girlfriend, Joanie, had been preoccupied for weeks with opening a restaurant. “She stays up with the menu planners and the decorators—it seems like all night – and then she crashes. She has no time for me when I call.” The problem, apparently, was that external concerns (not the relationship itself) had caused Joanie to be unresponsive. Joanie’s own life—that is, her own immediate needs—had taken precedence. By seeming to demand that she ignore her life, Dan was only exacerbating the situation. “Sometimes,” I said, “you need to give people space. When you do, they’ll come back . . . though if you don’t, they may not.”
The better way to demonstrate love, I suggested, was to show interest and concern, rather than to insist on oneself. “She sees asking for sex right now as selfish, a kind of indifference to her needs.” But, as we talked, it became clear that Dan did not consider asking for sex as selfish. He saw it, rather, as asking for mutual affirmation of their love and commitment. “Sex is sharing,” he said. “If she’s not willing to share something so basic, then how can she love me anymore?”
Dan was no dummy. In principle, he was right: Sex is a profound form of sharing. Yet still, the most emotionally astute response would be to acknowledge that what is correct in principle is not always correct in practice, on the ground, here and now. Sometimes a person has no energy left for sex. Their physical and even emotional energies are tied up in something of critical importance to their sense of well-being. It’s like if you were about to be hit by a tornado, would you stop for . . . anything?
I thought it was important that Dan put himself in her place. But he had trouble imagining how anyone wouldn’t need regular affirmation of the love they claimed to share with someone else. This was the crux of the problem. He carried around the idea that love needs overt, constant affirmation. He invested sex with the power to enact that affirmation. It was tangible, intense, undeniably an act of mutuality.
But Dan was asking too much of sex. “Listen,” I said, “Joanie would likely be horrified if she knew how you’re reacting. She probably just needs her energy to get this enterprise off the ground.” I suggested that the next time he called, he let her know how supportive he was of her project. “Maybe you could even offer to help.” The point was to turn down the pressure on her. At all costs, Dan shouldn’t let her think that he lacked confidence in the relationship, which might cause her to wonder herself. Nor should he imply that he lacked confidence in himself as someone worthy to be loved.
Like so much on the road to happiness, sex can be the object of deferred gratification. In relationships, we have to balance what we want, even need right now, with what is ultimately in the best interest of the relationship. We learn to sublimate our desires—not in our own best interest here and now, but in the mutual interest of both parties over the long haul.
My advice to Dan, therefore, was to bide his time. Be patient. Wait for the restaurant to open and for Joanie to get back to her routine. She might start missing sex as much as he did already. If she still remained “disconnected,” as he put it, there would be time enough for a candid conversation. Happiness is not a stable commodity. It fluctuates. “Think of it like rents in Manhattan,” I said. “There’s constant adjustment, based on the economy.” That is, external events—like opening a restaurant—can have an impact. So, you go with the flow. You accept that life is fraught with zingers, and sometimes we just have to duck.
Dan said that he would try. In the process, I hoped he’d see love as less transactional, less a series of fair trades. Sometimes, the balance tips in favor of one person or another, only to tip back towards the center over time. If you love someone and they love you, then you accept the pattern over the long haul and just keep going.
Fortunately, for Dan and his girlfriend, after the opening they reconnected. He felt well-fed and satisfied.
