My Emotional Needs

Every person is going to have different emotional needs based on their life experiences and their personality.  What many people don’t grasp, understand, or acknowledge is that events from our childhood, events that happened that we don’t even remember, psychological factors form our identities and how we process our emotions.  A great many people, the overwhelming and vast majority of people have never once considered or examined those things, those contributing factors to understand why they are the way they are.  I’m not that lucky. 

For ME, and me alone, I was raised by an emotionally and psychologically disturbed, unloving, physically abusive mother.  For the first, most formative years of my life, I was raised, however, by my grandparents who did an exceptional job of loving me and laying the foundation for me to be SOMEWHAT sane.  Many of my emotional needs stem from the psychological abuse my mother inflicted upon me. 

My first essential, primary, instinctual need is to feel loved.  Now, for most people, saying, “I love you,” means, I want to be in a relationship with you.  That’s not nearly enough for me.  I need to see your love evidenced.  Love is a verb.  Love is action, not words.  Love is showing me that you value me more than any other person, that you want my happiness, that you appreciate my talent and gifts and you’re willing to nurture them, that you respect them, that you are willing to put the needs of the relationship above your own personal, selfish needs.  If you curse me out, call me names, if you do things to intentionally hurt me, that’s not love, that’ abuse.  Love is not having to be asked to fix chicken soup and orange juice when I’m sick because your heart hurts when you see me in pain.  Love is cleaning off my car when it snows without me having to ask.  Love is making note of something I said I want six months before my birthday.   I NEED to feel loved.  I need to feel like my presence in your life is essential and that you would be “less than” without me.  It doesn’t mean buying me things, although sometimes that may be part of the package, but I need to feel like when I’m not in your physical presence that you are thinking about me and that it is your desire to make me happy . . . because you know and see and feel that I love you equally as intensely. 

I NEED honesty.  Honesty is not an emotional need however.  The emotional need is trust.  I’ve yet to meet the man who understands the concept of true honesty.  In this society, lying is first nature.  Most people lie by their first interaction with another human being during the day. Most people lie more than tell the truth.  I need honesty in ways that most people have never contemplated.  If you’ve never made a concerted effort to make sure that every word out of your mouth is true, then you lie habitually and constantly.  I have spent the last 20 years of my life trying very hard to make sure that I not only tell the truth but that I confess my lies when I tell one.  It’s hard work.  But, with that, comes the trust I need in a relationship.  I need to know that you will tell me if you aren’t happy, if you meet someone you find attractive, I need to know if you can confess when you lie.  I need to trust with all my heart that you will protect my heart.  I’ve said it to every lover and none of them have honored their promise.  I can handle the truth.  I can handle when you tell me something bad, something embarrassing, something regrettable.  I can handle you telling me that you cheated.  I can handle the truth.  If you tell me that you did something heinous and reprehensible, and you explain to me why you did it, and you come to me in HONESTY, we can figure out what made you do that particular thing, it’s possible I might be able to forgive you.  More than likely I won’t even be upset or mad.  More than likely, if you tell me the truth, if you tell me the thing that you think is going to make me hate you, I will simply see you as human and capable of making a mistake or being misguided or being damaged, like we all are.  If you lie . . . if you lie and don’t come clean and confess and make every effort to tell the truth so that I know that I can trust you, the relationship is over. 

My mother has never been supportive of me a day in her life.  Never once has my mother said, “You can do it, I believe in you.”  Because of that I need a lover who can be my cheerleader.  That means being able to make coffee and hand out flyers for the movement.  Seriously, it means I need you to see the vision I have for AfroerotiK and be able to contribute to my efforts, not deter from them.    What do you do well?  Show me that you believe in me not only with words but with your actions.  Are you going to set up the chairs for an AfroerotiK event, are you going to make sure the club owner has the right music queued up?  If all you are going to do is show up after everything is set up, and leave before everything is broken down, you are dead weight and I don’t need you in my life.  Of course, I understand if you have RESPONIBILITIES that prevent you from being there each and every time, but your support should be the rule, not the exception.  If you have to take your mother to the doctor’s, if you have to handle an emergency at work . . . I will certainly understand if you can’t be there for me on occasion.  But being supportive of me means knowing what projects I have in the works, getting a business card from someone you meet that you think might be able to help me.  It means that your only focus in life is not your career or the things that directly affect you but that you will make sure that I have quiet time when I need to write and you won’t pout and be self-centered and act like my every waking moment should be spent attending to you. 

When I was a child, a very small child in fact, my mother would get mad at me and not speak to me for WEEKS.  I lived in the same house with my mother who would go two, three, four weeks without saying a word to me.  I have the emotional need of being listened to, of being heard, of being respected, of being forgiven for my wrongdoings, and for basic communication.  I need my lover to be able to articulate his feelings in a healthy, constructive manner.  He can be mad at me all he wants.  He can’t be mad at me and not tell me about it.  He can’t expect me to know why he’s mad.  What he can’t do is not talk to me for extended periods of time.  That hurts me.  If he can’t express his feelings in a healthy way, I feel that same horrible isolation and fear that I felt as a young girl and that’s not good. 

I need to be valued for more than my gender role.  I am not sure what emotional need that would be.  Respected?  Appreciated?  I get that for thousands of years women have been relegated to the role of domestic, cook, maid, and child care provider.  I cannot and will not be in a relationship with anyone who thinks that my vagina makes me the only person in the household who can clean a toilet or dust.  We have to be able to sit down and figure out a system where I don’t feel like I’m your maid or where I feel like I’m being taken advantage of because you are holding on to absurd ideas about what a woman brings to the table.  I bring empathy, compassion, intellect, integrity.  Yes, I’m a very neat, clean, tidy person but it’s not my job, there is nothing about my uterus that designates that I have to follow behind you and clean up after you.  I need the spirit of cooperation in my relationship for me to flourish emotionally. 

Those are MY emotional needs.  If I have each of those needs met, I am desperate to fulfill every single solitary sexual fantasy my partner has.  Other women, obviously, will have other needs to varying degrees.  It’s the responsibility of each partner in a relationship to communicate their needs and work to helping their partner getting their emotional needs met.  That could be anything from being admired, feeling safe, feeling proud, or being in control, etc.   Men have emotional needs as well but they really haven’t done the work to know what they are.  Most men confuse their emotional needs with their physical needs.  They want to feel special and unique and they think that a woman having sex with them is sufficient to fill that need.  They don’t know how to communicate or express their fears or insecurities so they look for sex to fill that void.  The point is, even if your partner doesn’t know what their emotional needs are in the same way I do, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have them nor does it mean that they can be ignored.  In a relationship, you should be working to figure out what your emotional needs are, as they should always be evolving, and the need or your partner based on their actions and patterns, in order to build a stronger partnership.