When The Emotional Needs Of The Couple Control Us

When we prioritize the emotional needs of the couple, neglecting ours, everything begins to drift. This is something that, sometimes, we do almost without realizing it by letting ourselves be exclusively carried away by that impulse when it comes to satisfying the other. We also do it out of fear of losing the one we love and in turn, in order to demonstrate that we are capable of offering happiness and satisfaction.

Love, at times, creates situations as complex as they are exhausting. As striking as it may seem to us, those who go around the world with a blindfold in emotional matters are those who have their hearts bigger. They are those people, men and women, who give everything to be loved but are unable to see where they are going. And the path they follow is the one that sooner or later will lead to frustration and loss of self-esteem.

John Gottman comments in his books that if there is one aspect that will lead to the success and durability of a relationship, it is to accept the emotional needs of the other. It is true, this is something that nobody doubts, but even so, there are important nuances that we must never lose sight of.

The first is that such a task must be reciprocal. It is not enough for one to assume the role of the one who is limited only to satisfy and the other to receive. The second aspect, and perhaps the most important, is that sometimes, our partner cannot and should not nurture each and every one of our emotional needs. There are tasks, emotional debts, that are solely our own responsibility. Let’s see more data about it.

Your emotional needs, my emotional needs

All of us have emotional needs. The first is to feel loved, because love, after all, is the oxygen of life and in a relationship is the main food. Other needs are, for example, to feel safe, recognized, free to act, decide and communicate, etc.

All these dimensions appear in any affective bond because every relationship is dynamic, it is in continuous evolution and therefore, these realities must be present and taken care of every day. It is like someone who has a delicate flower, and cares for it by nourishing its roots and providing it with adequate light. If we neglect it, it will end up withering.

We could therefore define an emotional need as an internal desire that when satisfied, makes us feel good, happy and in balance. But if it is missing, unhappiness and frustration arise. Thus, experts on the subject such as Dr. Willard F. Harley, author of numerous books on couple relationships, explains to us in a work entitled Their Needs , that one of our most recurrent mistakes is to prioritize the emotional needs of the other over our own. Hence, he proposes to take into account some aspects.

Emotional needs have limits, too

In love there are limits, if there are barriers that delimit spaces that no one should exceed. An example, I cannot ask my partner to satisfy a need of mine if with it, I am forcing him to change his way of being. I cannot demand that someone who is introverted, shy and reserved, be more open because socially and for my work, I like having a person with this profile.

There are responsibilities that only fall to ourselves

There is a very common reality in couple relationships and it is the following: to think that the other person has the obligation to fill my voids, to be the support of my self-esteem and that figure that will strengthen my self-concept. We must be clear, our partner does not have the need or the obligation to save us from anything, or act as that basic component for our personal growth.

There are therefore emotional needs that must come to a previously covered relationship. It is not healthy to start a relationship when self-esteem is low, when there is an excess of fear, when we need to cling to someone or something almost desperately to defend ourselves from loneliness. All these realities lead us towards destinations of great suffering.

Attend to the needs of the other without neglecting ours

There is no specific and exclusive secret that allows us to build happy and lasting relationships; actually, there are many keys. There is communication, affection, concern for the other, empathy, reciprocity … Thus, knowing how to attend to the emotional needs of the couple must always go hand in hand with that other essential reversal: remembering that ours are just as important.

Therefore, we should not be afraid to demand to be taken into account. Let’s not wait for the other to ‘guess’ what we need either. Love does not give us magical powers, it gives us adult responsibilities. Hence, it is advisable to communicate, to assertively express what we need and what we expect from the other person. This exchange of information will allow us to build a space where we nurture and be nurtured, where we get to know each other better and continue to grow as a couple without ever ceasing to be ourselves.