When Your Needs Still Aren’t Being Met

I’ve been thinking about how I kept finding myself in the same situation over and over again, and how hard it was to understand the difference between logic and feeling.

Because logically, I knew certain things. I had worked really hard to learn how to clearly communicate my needs. In a previous relationship, I was often told, “I’m not a mind reader,” and I internalized that. It made me feel like the reason my needs weren’t being met was because I wasn’t communicating them clearly. So I started doing the work to check in with myself, asking what I was feeling, what I needed, how I needed it, when I needed it, and how often I needed it. And once I had those answers, I would come back and say, this is what I need, this is why I need it, this is how I need it, this is when I need it, this is how often I need it. I made it as clear as I could so that there was nothing left to figure out. I think a lot of us have been taught, directly or indirectly, that if we just communicate well enough, things will change. And what I started to realize was that even when I did all of that, my needs still weren’t being met.

Over time, I found myself in another situation with someone I genuinely believed cared about me, and still, my needs were not being met consistently. And it wasn’t because he didn’t know, because I had clearly communicated. I came to a place where I recognized and accepted that it wasn’t about him not knowing, and it wasn’t about him not caring. With him, specifically, despite how much we loved each other, I had to face that we were not compatible and we didn’t actually want the same things. And that can be a hard realization to come to when you’ve spent so much time trying to fix how you show up instead of questioning whether the fit is right.

On the surface, it looked like it was right. We both wanted to love and be loved, we both wanted peace, we wanted to enjoy each other’s company, we wanted to feel safe. There was a basic level of shared compatibility there. But I came to recognize that I needed structure in order to feel secure, and structure was not a priority for him. He moved more with the wind, he let things happen, while I planned for them. And when those two ways of being came together, it created tension.

Because sometimes the difference isn’t in what we want, but in what we need in order to feel safe within it.

I would find myself in a constant state of unease, and when I said what I needed and how I needed it, instead of that being honored, it would get framed as me thinking too much or being difficult. And what I had to sit with was that this wasn’t about me being too much. It was that we were not compatible. And it’s easy to take that kind of feedback personally when you’ve already been questioning yourself.

There was a particular kind of clarity that came with realizing that you could love someone and still not be compatible with them. You could love someone with your heart and still recognize that they were not good for your nervous system. And that doesn’t make the love less real, it just makes the truth harder to ignore.