Stop Looking For Someone To Complete You If You Want Real Love
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PHIL: People need each other for both physical and social support. We work together to make food and shelter; no one person can make all the goods and services we enjoy today. Because of that, we have a great need to connect with each other and fit together to undertake this massive amount of organization.
As infants, our physical and social needs are entirely supplied by our parents, and as we grow, we learn to take on more of these roles for ourselves. Then boom! We are out in the world, and we have to transition to finding that physical and emotional support from others, not from our parents. We find work to take care of the food and shelter. To replace the love and support of parents, we look for it from other people. As The Blues Brothers sing: “Everybody needs somebody”. It is a sense of incompleteness that you need someone else to complete you. Of course, it varies greatly from person to person depending on how well their needs were fulfilled when growing up. But that hole within you cannot be filled by another person. It might seem possible at first with a new lover because we project the qualities we need onto them, but that fades, and we are left searching. It is like being hungry: a meal will fill you up for a while, but then you are hungry again.
The only way to fill that hole is to do it yourself; to look inside and discover that you are complete in yourself, even as you still trade and need physical and social support with the rest of society. I don’t have a recipe for doing that. I had a pit of infinite emptiness in my twenties, and I can’t say why, though looking back, I can see some of its origins. Now I am complete in myself, though how the transition happened is unclear. I think that a combination of failed relationships and introspection brought me to where I am today. I am complete even as I need food, shelter, and contact with other people.
The sense is that with Maude, I am added to, rather than being completed. It is a sense of more than myself. It means that we can coexist without feeling that we have to fix or patch up the other person. It allows us to move apart and be independent effortlessly and to come back together with the same ease, because those movements cause no change in the self. And yet we are intimately bound up with each other and fill that deep human need for contact. Paradox much?
MAUDE: Do you conduct your relationships from the perspective of neediness? Are you looking to fill holes you feel within yourself through what you get from the other person? These are questions worth asking yourself, although ones that many people avoid looking at.
I’m not referring to the give and take that characterizes all peaceful relationships, nor the way two people, each unique, can learn so much from each other through their very differences. I’m not asking whether you have needs and hope that they will be included in the thoughts and actions of other people. Of course you do; we all do.
I mean seeing yourself as empty of something inside that you think you can fix by getting it from another person. Yes, you can mitigate a feeling of loneliness by changing the experience that is causing your feelings of isolation; by creating and maintaining connections. But you cannot change yourself through another person. When you want to alter things that are making you sad, uncomfortable, or unhappy, going within is the path to that kind of change. A feeling of being complete, not perfect, but whole, only comes from inner work.
When a relationship is based on filling your sense of emptiness, then you are busy all the time with yourself. You are not available to relate. You are not thinking of the other person, except in terms of what you need. When the clamoring inside is about me, me, me, then you are truly alone whether someone else is there or not.
This way of being creates an imbalance in a relationship, and it is one that cannot be resolved within the relationship. It is self-work alone that can alter such a feeling. When being out of balance in this way continues in any relationship, it causes separation, anxiety, irritation. It is counter-productive to true connection.
In order to have deep relationships, you have to be available to know and be known. You have to be able to be present with the other person; to care about them and what they need and want. You have to learn to listen, not because you want something, but because you are genuinely interested and care about the other. This is how you can experience peace within your relationships. This is how you can experience peace within yourself.
Photo credit: Maude Mayes
Photo note: Being ignored at a July 4th party
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