Loving without Needing

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

                                             —Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

I. PRE-EXISTING NEEDS vs. EMERGENT VALUES.................50
        A. Pre-Existing Needs..............................................................50
                1. Security & the Need to be Needed...........................52
                2. Approval..........................................................................53
                3. Romance.........................................................................54
                4. Sex....................................................................................55
                5. Affection & Intimacy.....................................................56
                6. Communication & Companionship.........................57
                7. Relationship Structure................................................58
        B. Emergent Values..................................................................60
                1. Emergent Values in my Relationship with Pat......61
                2. Emergent Values in my Relationship with Sara....64
                3. Emergent Values in other Relationships................65
II. LOVE AS A NEED vs. LOVE AS A LUXURY...........................66
        A. Loved Based on Prior Needs............................................66
        B. Love as a Luxury, rather than a Necessity....................67
III. I-IT USING vs. I-THOU ENCOUNTER.......................................68

IV. WHEN NEEDING TURNS INTO USING..................................71

V. WHAT TO DO ABOUT NEEDING LOVE..................................72

    Whether love always arises from pre-existing needs
is one of the most controversial questions raised in this book.
One culture teaches us that we all have certain basic human needs
that must be satisfied in our relationships with others.
But this chapter presents a new form of love, based not on prior needs
but on the values that emerge unexpectedly in actual loving relationships.

    Various schools of academic psychology
are major sources of the belief that love arises from need.
(Do we think of monkey-experiments when we think of our 'need for love'?)
Behaviorist psychology claims that all behavior arises from need.
Thus we create even 'loving relationships' to satisfy prior expectations.
This assumption is so deep that many writers merely presuppose it
and proceed to discuss the needs that 'love' is supposed to fulfill.
In these terms, 'ideal relationships' satisfy all our needs.

    Existentialism, however, takes a very different view of human life.
Instead of assuming a fixed 'human nature' with given qualities and needs,
existentialism describes the human person as open, creative, and free,
full of potentialities rather than possessed by drives.

     Our freedom can enable us to re-design our own lives
rather than following the patterns provided by society.
As we re-focus our lives around our freely-chosen ultimate concerns,
we rise above simply gratifying needs and seeking pleasure.
As we develop more integrated selves,
we leave behind our immature and needy emotional responses
—such as attempts to 'fall in love' according to the romantic pattern.
Loving from Authenticity is deeper than romance
because such relationships arise from our self-creating selves
rather than our original personalities
—which were created by several years of cultural conditioning.
Our early romantic feelings arose from emotional programming,
but when we become self-directing, we freely create our relationships.
Thus love is no longer an irresistible passion that overwhelms us
but a creative activity—like improvising music—we carefully undertake.

I. PRE-EXISTING NEEDS vs. EMERGENT VALUES

     Which comes first, love or need?
Do our inner deficiencies and hungers drive us to search for satisfiers?
Or does our wonder and appreciation for the persons we love
emerge out of actual loving experiences together?
Probably we used to believe that innate needs were primary,
that before we would even think of beginning a relationship,
we must have a need for it—"Why else would anyone love?"
But perhaps we have discovered that the best gifts of love
emerge unexpectedly in real encounters with actual persons.
We had our pre-existing needs when we were still lonely individuals,
but the emergent values only appeared as the result of active loving.

       PRE-EXISTING NEEDS                            EMERGENT VALUES

1. arise within isolated selves.              1. emerge from actual relationships.

2. many possible satisfiers.                  2. only one relationship can create
                                                                      these specific, unique values.

3. desires without a specific partner.   3. valuing a specific person.

4. general inward lacks and wants.      4. based on unique experiences.

5. "I love you because I need you."      5. "I 'need' you because I love you."

6. love as a necessity.                          6. love as a luxury.

7. I-It use.                                              7. I-Thou  encounter.

8. romantic illusions.                             8. loving from Authenticity.

       A. Pre-Existing Needs.

     Perhaps we feel within ourselves needs for: security, approval,
romance, sex, affection, communication, and relationship structure
before we begin looking for people to satisfy these wishes.
These prior needs, lacks, deficiencies, hopes, desires, etc.
exist entirely within our own psyches when we yearn for love.