To Be Human Is to Need

Lately, I’ve been noticing something in my practice that feels important enough to sit with a little longer. I work primarily with relationships — romantic relationships, friendships, family systems, and the relationship someone has with themselves — and especially with clients who are dating or longing for partnership, there’s a particular tension that keeps surfacing. It’s subtle, but it’s consistent.

It’s the hesitation to admit that they need a relationship.

Not want. Need.

There’s a common cultural position that if you need someone, you’re immature, insecure, codependent, not fully developed yet. We celebrate the person who can do everything alone. The one who isn’t fazed. The one who doesn’t rely on anyone. Self-sufficiency gets framed as strength, and needing gets framed as weakness.

Needs are inherently vulnerable. To name a need is to expose yourself to the possibility that it won’t be met. That someone might reject it, misunderstand it, or dismiss it. So many of us learn, very early, to manage that vulnerability by minimizing what we need. We rename it. We soften it. We say, “I don’t need it. I just want it.”

I hear that distinction often. Sometimes it’s accurate, but sometimes it feels like protection.

Our relationship with need forms long before we have language for it. As children, we are entirely dependent. We cannot regulate ourselves. We cannot meet our own physical or emotional needs. We are vulnerable in a way that we never quite are again. How those early needs were responded to — not perfectly or imperfectly, but simply as they were — shapes how we orient toward needing over time.

If the environment was chaotic, we might have learned to quiet ourselves so we wouldn’t add to the noise. If it was unpredictable, we might have learned to detach from the experience of needing at all. If it was boundaryless, we might have learned to escalate when something wasn’t met. We adapt. We orient outward. We organize ourselves around what seems available.

That’s not pathology. That’s the human condition.

On top of that, we grow up into a culture that reinforces the same thing. We praise the person who doesn’t need help. The college student working three jobs. The single parent holding it all together. The friend who never asks for anything. There’s admiration attached to not needing much. By the time we’re adults navigating romantic relationships, even admitting the simple need for connection can feel like we’re confessing something embarrassing.

However, dependency and need are not the same thing.

As adults, we are not dependent in the way we were as children. We have capacity now. We can feed ourselves, regulate ourselves, and build lives. That raw, incapable vulnerability of early childhood doesn’t return in the same form.

And yet there are needs that remain inherently relational. You cannot meet your own need for human connection in isolation. You can self-soothe. You can self-reflect. You can build competence, but the experience of being known, of witnessing and being witnessed, of shared presence — those require another person.

That doesn’t make the need childish. It makes it real.

Underneath “I don’t need it, I just want it,” there is often something quieter and more honest. I feel lonely. I want my life shared. I want someone to see what I see, to know what I know, and to build something with me. If I don’t have it, I will survive. I will not collapse into nothingness, but something essential in me reaches for connection.

There is strength in saying that plainly.

I know this terrain personally because I lived in the opposite position for a long time. I was comfortable saying I didn’t need anyone. I interpreted independence as security. I remember times when friends would ask if I wanted company and I would reflexively say no, almost before I checked in with myself. I genuinely believed I preferred being alone.

Over time, I realized that what I called independence was often armor. It was easier to dismiss the need than to feel the vulnerability of wanting something I couldn’t guarantee. Easier to position myself as self-contained than to risk not being chosen.

There is merit in being able to be alone. There is strength in self-sufficiency, but when independence becomes a shield against the discomfort of needing, it can quietly narrow our lives.

The question isn’t whether you should need. The question is what your relationship to needing is.

When you imagine saying, “I need relationship in my life,” what happens inside you? Does it feel exposed? Does it feel like a loss of power? Or does it feel orienting, clarifying something that has been true all along?

You can be deeply self-sufficient and still have needs. Those realities don’t cancel each other out. You can manage your life competently and still feel that it is more inhabited when it’s shared. You can be independent and still say, “You matter here. My life is different with you in it.”

Needs also shift. There are seasons where the need in relationship is primarily about enjoyment, shared presence, and a sense of being accompanied. There are other seasons where practical support becomes more visible. None of that is static, and none of it signals regression. It signals responsiveness to life.

To be human is to need. Not in a collapsing, childlike way. Not in a way that erases autonomy, but in the simple recognition that some aspects of being alive are inherently relational.

It took me a long time to say that without cringing. Now it feels grounding. It clarifies what I’m actually doing when I choose relationship. It helps me stay when things feel vulnerable. It makes the longing less shameful and more understandable.

To be human is to need, and there is nothing broken about that.