Needing Others for Pleasure
Needing Others for Pleasure
by: ROCK ROKA
Let us examine how our needs for pleasure and affirmation
can limit and distort our experience of love.
We create relationships that give us pleasure and affirmation
as well as security. We may be dependent upon the other for
money, shelter, sex, travel, clothing, encouragement,
compliments, humor, tasty food, a clean house, comforts,
or even his or her beauty.
Yet, if he or she stops providing these for us, or decides
to provide them for someone else, do we continue loving
that person or do we feel hurt, disillusioned, and overcome
with feelings of injustice, anger and perhaps
revenge?
The condition here is that "I love as long as you provide
me pleasure, happiness or excitement. If you stop, my feelings
change." It is conditional
love.
Needing Others for Affirmation
We may also depend on someone for affirmation. This may
take various forms.
1. We are affirmed when others obey us. "You listen
to me and do what I say. I can control you. That makes me feel
powerful and worthy. If, however, you stop doing whatever
I say, I will stop feeling love and unity with you."
This becomes a problem for parents when their children
move into adolescence. This can also occur between spouses.
In many countries a wife might be suppressed at first, and
thus, the husband feels powerful and affirmed. If, however,
she begins to think and act for herself, he begins to panic
and can become angry and sometimes aggressive. The roles
may also be reversed where the woman controls and feels
affirmed.
2. We also feel affirmation when someone needs us or is dependent
on us. This could occur between parent and child, teacher
and student, friends, or between the "savior"
and the "needy."
In these cases, the "needed" feels affirmed
by and perhaps superior to the "needy". This
is one aspect of codependency. Some of us find meaning in
life because someone needs us or depends on us. If however,
the other doesn't want to be the child, the student
or the needy one anymore, do we feel the same attraction
and love? If not, our love is mixed with our need to be "needed".
In such a case, we need to give, offer, and sacrifice in order
to feel useful, worthy or boost our self-image. If this
is the case, then all that we offer in these situations,
all our sacrifices, are actually for ourselves and not
for the others.
That does not negate the fact that others may actually need
us, or that we also simultaneously have feelings of altruistic
love. We are often motivated by two or three motives simultaneously
3. A third aspect of this attraction for affirmation is
the situation in which we "love" those "who
affirm our rightness", either verbally by telling
us we are right, or simply by belonging to the same social,
political, religious or spiritual group and thus embrace
a similar belief system.
"I love you because you agree with me, you are like
me, you affirm me". If they change beliefs and convert
to another political party, religion, or spiritual group,
will we feel the same closeness and "love?"
Perhaps yes, perhaps no.
A fourth aspect of this affirmation principle is infatuation
- called "Eros" (in Greek "erotas")
or "falling in love". In this case there is a
mutual (occasionally only one-sided) infatuation on
the physical, sexual, emotional and sometimes mental
level. This is a special attraction between two persons
who excite, bring joy to and stimulate each other positively.
This positive stimulation often has to do with the needs
for security, pleasure and affirmation.
This intensity of these feelings seldom lasts more than
a few years. The couple then has the possibility of transforming
their "Eros" into a steady form of unconditional
love, or facing the sadness of conflict and / or separation.
Sooner or later, we will come face to face with the other's
various negative aspects, and if we cannot love them as
they are, the relationship suffers.
Until we are able to love unconditionally, we will be unhappy,
insecure and frequently in conflict with those around
us. We will be able to do this only when we have matured sufficiently
so as to experience inner security, inner satisfaction,
inner freedom and a steady feeling of self-worth.
In other words, we can love purely only those who we do not
need.
When we need others, we cannot love them unconditionally.
This might be difficult to comprehend at first, but deep
thought and observation will prove it to be true. Being
able to love without conditions is a basic prerequisite
for both a happy life and spiritual evolution.
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