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Relationships
The Deepest Intimacy
What if we didn't need a relationship?
Posted July 20, 2019 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Many if not most of us enter a romantic relationship from a place of need. We feel lonely; we need company. We feel anxious; we need to feel safe. We feel incomplete; we need to feel completed. We feel insecure; we need to know our worth. We unconsciously look for a person that will meet that need — who will help us not feel the way we feel inside anymore.
We find that person. Or rather, we have a momentary experience, a few weeks or months, when we believe those needs have been met. Problem solved. Those feelings of loneliness, anxiety, incompleteness, and insecurity go away for a minute and we feel tremendous relief. Our life finally looks and feels like what we have been longing for, and we settle in.
Then things go terribly wrong.
Most of the time, things go wrong slowly and over time. This other person is not available sometimes and we feel lonely again. They have their own issues or they behave in ways that take our sense of safety away. They stop focusing all of their attention on us and we begin to feel insecure again.
Most of us respond to these experiences with hurt. There is a feeling of deprivation that grows, and we respond with anger, complaints, or withdrawal. Arguments happen, and often there is more distortion and codependency as a way to try to manage it — we try to make ourselves into the perfect person in order to get that feeling back again. Sometimes there is acting-out, manipulation, rejection, and an attempt to control. This can all happen in a matter of months or it can happen over many years, but eventually the relationship begins to come apart.
But what if we enter a relationship differently?
What if we didn’t need a relationship? What if we worked on meeting all of those scary needs ourselves? What if we leaned into loneliness until we became happy in our own company. If we held ourselves lovingly when we felt anxious until we could help ourselves feel safe again. If we became confident in our own self-worth and developed our spiritual connection to learn a deeper experience of completeness.
What, then, would be the goal of a relationship? If I enter a relationship without a need for it, then I enter it because I’ve got great chemistry with someone and because that person interests me — I have fun with them, I am intrigued by them, I like them. I want to get to know them more deeply — to discover who they are, how they think, what their values are. I am interested in who they are and who they are becoming.
From this place, I am focused on discovering who the other person is. I don’t need them to be a certain way. I want to find out who they are and my feelings about them are based on their identity. Because I don’t fear losing something that can’t be replaced, I show them all of who I am and what’s important to me. We go slow, taking our time to learn about who the other is. The love grows between us because we see each other clearly and we want to support this other person on their path. We become not just lovers, but more importantly, friends.
From this place, I am never trying to convince my partner to be someone they are not for me. I am not frustratingly trying to get needs met that they don’t naturally meet. Instead, I am slowly learning about who this person is and adjusting to that reality accordingly. I am not trying to be someone I am not for them, but instead allowing them to adjust to the reality of me. We are basing our level of intimacy on how authentic we both are, how clearly we can see each other’s authentic selves.
This will help us make healthy choices about how involved we actually desire to be in each other’s lives. The relationship will grow or not depending on the truth of what we both want and who we both are. The relationship will shift and morph as it becomes an expression of what is true between us as we keep learning and staying in the reality of our authenticity — even if it is uncomfortable or involves loss.
From this place, the relationship we make may last or it may end. It may become a friendship or it may become a romantic partnership that lasts a lifetime. Whatever it becomes, it will not be from an effort to make it into something but from deep knowledge and experience of ourself and the other. If it ends, it will be because that was the right choice, and both people are comfortable enough with themselves to acknowledge this truth. If it deepens and grows over time, it will become one of the most intimate relationships of our lives.
