Want You, Need You

By Dr. William K. Larkin on March 10, 2010

We have the idea that a relationship will satisfy a lot of our "wants." So much of our desire for a relationship with another person is based on wanting to heal a "hole" of loneliness, couched in the belief that everything would be so much better if we just had someone to share it all with. Then we get someone and they don't want to share what we want to share or they don't want to share what we want them to share at the time we want to share it. They don't "come through" for us.

There are many reasons for a relationship, even with an animal. The "other" does something for us emotionally that we need to learn to be able to do for ourselves. What they "give" us is something we have not yet given ourselves.

We want to share times and moments and events in a relationship with someone with the idea that doing so will make them as "shared," more meaningful. If they would just "show up" and share it! How many times have you wanted to share something with a mate who is snoring, so you just decided that you would enjoy it yourself, on your own? Just because you may be in a relationship doesn't mean, as you well know, that this person will "show up" to share the evening, the sunrise, the vacation, the movie, or just the evening news, when you would like them beside you.

We are always living in a fundamental relationship with ourselves, to some degree of richness and completion, or the lack of it. We treat loneliness as something that only someone on the outside of us can heal or deal with. Loneliness is only something dealt with from the inside out. Loneliness is not about finding a soulmate. It's rather about finding yourself at home for you.

Most of us assume that we are good at feeling positive emotions, good at being happy. Most are not. We need to practice being with ourselves, feeling positive emotions, and most of all we need a whole new discovery of the reality that we need to "learn" to be happy. It just doesn't happen and it never happens because someone else does it for us.

Love is a wonderful thing when someone else doesn't have to fill the cup of what we lack inside ourselves when we have not grown up enough to provide it for ourselves.

What about touching, embracing, love-making and just plain sexual gratification? You can't really give these to yourself. There is a great myth in the novels of love and the movies that treat all of this like a drug that fills in our deepest loneliness. Ecstasy and the bliss of love-making, just like the rest of life, happen after you have come home "to you" and found your home in the Source of you that dwells within you. We are "one" in many expressions of love, but the oneness starts by finding it in yourself.

Want "you."