When One Person Has to Be Needy so the Other Can Feel Invulnerable

Sometimes, without anything being explicitly said, couples come to certain remarkably awkward and sinister agreements between them about who might do what in the relationship. Among the most distinctive and painful of these agreements is when one person effectively says to another: ‘Could you be extremely needy and anxious so that I can be invulnerable and detached? Could you be wondering where I am all the time and where we are headed so that I can feel wanted but not in need? Can you – in effect – carry all the risks of love for me?’

On a typical day in such a relationship, person A may be left worrying about when person B will come back home and they’ll be told that they shouldn’t be so demanding, because there are some friends in town and who knows when the evening will end? Or person A will look at their phone waiting and waiting for a message that was due ‘no later than midday’ but still hasn’t come through by mid-afternoon – and will feel that they are losing their mind. Or person A will be made to feel that person B’s work is so important and leaves no room for anyone except of course B’s friends, who give a lot of parties and often invite B out (but not really A). Constantly, A feels like they are chasing B – and B is off-hand, cool, and elsewhere.

There tends to be a very specific history to B’s behaviour. In their childhoods, they were made to feel ashamed of their needs. They had to be a strong little boy or girl and all the praise came in relation to their independence and lack of what was called ‘weakness.’ The lesson of the past is that their needs are repulsive and must be excised at all costs.

Nevertheless, the desire to love and be loved hasn’t gone away. It’s just so dangerous that it has to be experienced by proxy. B gives A the responsibility of expressing a level of emotional hunger that is theirs in part but that they can’t permit themselves to experience consciously. A will have to crave and long so that B can continue to think they don’t need anything as babyish and silly as love.

This bargain is no fun for A. They might – in a different relationship – have been rather calm and composed, adult and cheerful. But there is no chance of any such respite in this set up. Here they are constantly having to doubt themselves and their sanity: why are they so demanding? Why do they look at their phone so many times waiting for a text? Why do they find themselves pleading and begging like a small child that their partner spend more time with them? Why are they so pathetic (as the partner hints they are)? What’s happened to their adult dignity? 

Meanwhile, B can stand back and complain of feeling trapped and hounded, not given enough freedom and held too tightly in mind. They can wonder in an off hand way: ‘Goodness me, why are they making such a fuss! They are so intense, it’s revolting!’ Which is a version of what someone would have made them feel when they were very little.

This can’t go on indefinitely. At some point, person B has to stop hitching a free ride on A’s emotional coattails. At some point they have to own up to some of their own childlike dependence. At some point, they need to come to a realisation they have been in flight from since their early days: ‘I am a needy person too, as every human is, entirely legitimately. There is nothing pathetic at all about craving love; the only weakness is to keep wanting so badly to be ‘strong.’’

B has to confront their terror that they will tell A that they crave them and then A will run away and mock and disdain them. And they have to see that, blessedly, this is just a terror, not a fact, one that owes its origins to the particular circumstances of Bs childhood, not to the nature of adult reality.

The beautiful truth is that the moment that B can learn to say ‘I need you’ will also be the moment when A can finally start to relax and be at peace in the relationship (and incidentally, love B more deeply). No one will have to abandon anyone; fear can lessen on both sides. Vulnerability is so much less of a burden when, finally, two people can be brave enough to own up to their share of it.