15/10/2023
TRUE LOVE CANT MEET ALL YOUR NEEDS
Your partner can’t meet all your needs to be seen and heard.
Sounds sad, doesn’t it?
I am talking specifically about being interested in your hobbies and or constant emotional looping.
It is ironic, because I say my best advice is to look for a partner that can be consistently attuned, responsive, engaged, sensitive, fair, safe and reliable. I stand behind that 100%. You just have to understand what primary needs are vs. secondary needs. Not all your needs are primary needs, even if they feel like it.
A healthy partner will NOT want to give you their undivided attention to listen daily about your hobbies and every day issues outside of the relationship. They won’t want to hear your favorite podcast or attend your favorite conference. That doesn’t mean that they are not attuned, responsive or engaged with you. It means that these are secondary needs.
You know who that is for? Extended friends and community. When you take responsibility for not expecting your lover to be your entire inner circle, the relationship thrives. You leave the small circle of two and become enriched with other people, ideas and experience and come back full to your partner. This is the way to thrive together vs. burn each other out.
You can not make your lover into your surrogate best friend that is constantly embroiled into listening to your interests, hobbies, emotional world, your sadness, depression, angst and personal thoughts daily.
They will get burned out.
The more severe trauma we carry in our system the more we fight to be heard and seen by our partner. But that hurts our relationship. We become like a child constantly tugging at mom’s skirt for her to: Watch this mommy, watch this!
When we don’t receive enough attention in childhood, we think we can make our partner our best friend and our relationship suffers. At worst we learn to fake being in distress to get more attention and our partner burns out.
The partner is there to create emotional safety for you around your primary needs, but they are not there to become all the friends and community that you should be creating around you to listen to your deepest interests, hobbies and emotional looping. If you don’t have friends and community, take responsibility for that and make a change.
For example, my husband will always be there to hear my heart if I am hurting about something in the relationship. He won’t rest until we are well and connected to each other. He is 100% responsive to my primary needs. He supports my hobbies and encourages me to seek them out. But he will not be here to listen to my synopsis around every new book, podcast or experience I have had around my interests. He can listen a bit to my heart if I feel hurt over a friend, but he can’t be there to process it with me all the time like a therapist or community member.
My ex boyfriend on the other hand would try to make me feel bad about hobbies he didn’t agree with, like me going to a spiritual talk. He would use sarcasm as a way to make me feel inferior for having spiritual interests. This is a partner that is not sensitive or supportive. I am so glad I am not in that relationship anymore. Emotional abuse is very subtle.
Even though my husband and I are both spiritual we have different practices, listen to different teachers and have different interests around it. But we respect each others direction even if we might not understand it. That is the difference between my ex and my husband. I am allowed to be my own person with my husband, but he has his boundaries around his time and what he chooses to listen to or not.
Secure attachment is NOT meeting ALL of the NEEDS of your partner. There are secondary needs we need to share with a friends, community, a therapist or coach and being more comfortable in our own aloneness. Secure attachment IS holding your partner’s secondary emotions and interests with care and respect, but not necessarily needing to be enmeshed in them.
This is hard stuff. And the trauma to feel heard and seen is deep and extremely painful. This is where we learn to reparent ourselves.
Gigi Azmy