SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER 4

Loving without Needing

Seven Pre-Existing Needs and How to Transcend Them

    This chapter challenges one of the oldest assumptions about love
—that people create 'loving' relationships
for the purpose of satisfying pre-existing needs.

    While this is certainly true of most 'loving' relationships,
and while it is worth exploring just how such needs distort 'love',
this old way of loving can be replaced by a completely new way of loving,
—a way of creating relationships based not on prior needs
but on unexpected, emergent values
—surprises that can only arise thru actual encounters with others.

    This chapter analyzes
each of the following seven pre-existing needs:
1. Security & the Need to be Needed.
2. Approval.
3. Romance.
4. Sex.
5. Affection & Intimacy.
6. Communication & Companionship.
7. Relationship Structure.

    Each analysis also explores what love would be like
if it were not organized for the purpose of satisfying that prior need.

    When we either satisfy our own needs within ourselves
or if we transcend what we assumed were basic human needs,
then we can love without expectations, without clinging,
and without using the people we would like to love.

HOW READING
"Loving without Needing:
Seven Pre-Existing Needs and How to Transcend Them"
MIGHT CHANGE YOUR LOVE-LIFE

    If the primary motives for your early 'loving' relationships
were any of the prior needs discussed in this chapter,
then your future relationships could be fundamentally different
if you transcend your pre-existing needs
and begin to love on the basis of what you discover about each other
rather than the needs either of you brought to the relationship.

    The first steps toward this new way of loving
include becoming explicitly aware of what prior needs
you used to assume were behind everyone's desire to 'love'.
Then in the long process of becoming more Authentic,
you might begin a complete new way of living and loving.
Then love can become a luxury, rather than a necessity.
Then you can accept the other for whoever he or she is,
without seeking to re-make the person you love over
into a person who will be more useful for satisfying
your pre-existing desires, plans, yearnings, hopes, etc.

    Loving without needing is open, liberating, & free.

revised 8-4-2007; 2-13-2014; 2-24-2017;