Need Dynamics
There’s neediness, and then there’s wantiness.
Being around someone who wants is a low-stakes experience. A want is (basically by definition) a non-critical desire. It’s extra credit, icing on the cake—if the want is fulfilled, happiness results, but if the want is not fulfilled, no big deal, life goes on.
Being around someone who needs, on the other hand, means taking on a non-zero amount of responsibility. A needy person is an endothermic system, like a car—they often require a steady influx of resources (gas) and the occasional larger contribution (maintenance).
That doesn’t mean that needy people are broken, or bad—it would be ridiculous to expect your car to run without some kind of fuel, and you get benefits out of the non-sustainable system of a car that you can’t get if you’re unwilling to put energy in. And, of course, there’s no black-and-white distinction between “needy” and “not needy”—people fall at different points on the spectrum at various times and circumstances, and everyone will be more or less needy at some point in their lives. In fact, the part of us that reacts negatively to perceived neediness in others is itself a need—for freedom, for flexibility, for the sense that we are not burdened by the weight of someone else’s affections, someone else’s well-being, someone else’s story.
But it does mean that neediness carves up the world. Just as people who can’t afford gas don’t buy cars, people who can’t (currently) spare resources tend to distance themselves from the (currently) needy.
Part I: Wariness
I’ve recently been entranced by the idea that the best explanations only have one intuitive leap, or only present one new concept (with the rest consisting mainly of reminding the audience of what it already knows, and putting that knowledge into the appropriate scaffold). By that token, I’ve been trying to make each of my essays “about” one thing, and one thing only.
Unfortunately, my model of neediness isn’t yet clear enough to count as one thing. Instead, what I’ve got is like a collection of juggling balls—they don’t quite connect, and they don’t quite make sense on their own, but hopefully if I toss them all into the air at once, they’ll add up to an interesting show that leaves you with some food for thought.
The first of those balls is wariness. Wariness emerges when a person experiences some combination of:
- Uncertainty. You don’t know what to do next, and you can’t confidently predict the outcomes of various possible actions. Your model of the situation isn’t sufficient for you to feel fully in control.
- Threat. You sense danger, in some form—perhaps physical, perhaps emotional, perhaps reputational. Maybe some of your finite resources are at risk of being burned, or you’re coming up on choices that will pit one part of your self-image against another.
- Confinement. You can’t simply leap toward safety and certainty. You’re either stuck, or feel like you’re on the edge of becoming stuck. You might be trapped or smothered, or you might feel like you could leave, except for the commitments you’ve made or the people who are relying on you.
In my head, wariness looks like a kid whose parent has some kind of explosive mood disorder. They’re not sure what to say or do to prevent an episode, they’ve got no way to protect themselves from verbal or physical abuse, and there’s no good way for them to distance themselves from the situation. They’re tense—on edge—hyper-alert—burning through cognitive and emotional resources at a high rate as they monitor the situation a dozen times a second.
Of course, that’s just the archetype—wariness doesn’t always take that form, and (hopefully) it’s not usually that extreme. It is always, however, divisive and corrosive to some degree. It’s a force in opposition to intimacy—if I’m wary of you, I’m going to seek distance rather than closeness, I’m going to raise shields over my vulnerable parts, I’m going to husband my resources and shy away from commitments, and I’m going to present a filtered, curated façade rather than risking the possibility that my genuine, off-the-cuff authenticity will trigger you in some way.
Insofar as I’m only a little bit wary, I’ll only do these things a little bit—even the healthiest, closest relationships contain some wariness, to protect against mood swings and mistakes and misunderstandings. But if you’re struggling to achieve intimacy and failing, it’s a safe bet that either you or your partner (or both) is doing things that lead the other person to feel wary. Getting a clear understanding of what those things are and why they pose a threat is a critical first step toward any meaningful course correction.
Neediness can produce wariness in several different ways:
- Gentle giant: If you become much more important to Alice and Bob than they are to you, it’s easy to worry that casual shifts in your emotions or priorities will produce outsized effects on their happiness or well-being. I’ve found myself tiptoeing around people in the past, for fear that my casualness will be interpreted as indifference and my independence will be taken as rejection.
- Free spirit: If Alice and Bob begin to construct a story around you, incorporating you into their lives in meaningful ways, there’s every possibility that you’ll see the scaffold they’re creating as a cage. The roles we form for one another may be ill-shaped, and even if they’re well shaped, people grow and change. I’ve caused others to become wary because they felt I was walling them in, and they weren’t sure whether they’d eventually have to make a break for the exit.
- Good Samaritan: If someone is fragile or unstable—say, Alice has a history of depression, or Bob has recently experienced loss, or Cameron has demonstrated an inability to predict their own moods, desires, and needs—it’s easy to feel caught by the sense that they’ll destabilize without you. In cases like these, I’ve felt a twofold wariness—both a gentle giant fear of causing accidental harm, and a moral compulsion to stay and fulfill the role of helper despite my personal desire to walk.
- Last cookie: Because humans are pattern-matchers and creatures of habit, we often employ the same strategy over and over again. If you’ve given resources to Alice or Bob before—whether social, emotional, financial, or otherwise—it’s reasonable for them to come to you for those resources again, and for you to feel some consistency pressure to provide them. But if you’re starting to run low yourself (or even if you have plenty, but simply prefer not to give anymore), it’s easy to become wary of anything that looks like an attempt to grab more. In the past, I’ve simply assumed that people would be there for me forever, and the ones who’d never intended to make any such commitment reacted predictably (and justifiably).
I’ve tried, in the examples above, to be judgment-neutral about who is to blame—one of the things that makes neediness so damaging to interpersonal relationships is the fact that it’s relative. It can’t be compared to some objective, checkable reality—what’s supportive and healthy for one pair can be codependent and draining for another, and the same is often true of two individuals in relation to each other.
Because of that, it’s hard to fight. You might identify several characteristics of my behavior that come across as signaling neediness, and I might address all of them while failing to make so much as a dent in your overall perception. Similarly, I might claim to be all kinds of stable and happy, but if you feel like your movements are constrained (because you’re a Good Person, and Good People don’t abandon their friends in times of trouble), my assurances might not do anything to ameliorate your wariness.
In short, discussions about whether or not a perception of neediness is justified are missing the point. Telling a feeling it has no business existing doesn’t usually work; the emotional parts of our brains respond to stories and experiences, not reasoned arguments.
This is rough, no question about it. It means that neediness is (at least in part) outside of our control. It’s a narrative, existing in the space between you and the other person, and narratives can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies despite the best intentions of everyone involved. They can take root in the smallest miscommunications, gathering momentum from imperceptible primings, unconscious framings, and tiny interactions—interactions that often feel far too petty or trivial to address in the moment, meaning that they go unchallenged until the circumstantial evidence has already begun to pile up.*
Part II: The Iterated Ask
One of the best weapons against wariness is clear communication—if both parties have strong and detailed models of the other’s needs and priorities, they’re less likely to fall into some kind of negative feedback loop where requests lead to wariness which leads to anxiety, et cetera.
Often, though, clear communication is harder to achieve than we think—there are times when both parties feel like they’ve expressed themselves and both parties feel that they’ve been heard, and yet mutual understanding still hasn’t been achieved. As an example, I’d like to present a particular neediness dynamic that I’ve recently found myself on opposite sides of.
Let’s imagine that Alice and Bob have some form of relationship (romantic, platonic, professional—doesn’t matter).
Bob has a request to make of Alice—there’s something he needs. Perhaps it’s a hug, perhaps it’s an evening’s attention, perhaps it’s some simple task like getting an email sent or the garbage taken out.
By itself, Bob’s need does not equate to neediness. If Alice and Bob treat one another as equals, and have established stable and mutual trust, then something like the following happens:
Often, however, the interaction goes in a different direction:
Bob: “Can I have a hug?”
Alice (considers): “No, I don’t really feel like a hug right now.”
Bob: “Please? It’s been a really rough day.”
Alice: …
Dun dun friggin’ duuhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnn.
This is the iterated ask, and in my experience, it’s both one of the most difficult dynamics to navigate in a relationship, and also one of the most important.
You see, despite the fact that Alice and Bob heard the same words in the same order, it’s not only possible but quite common for them to have had fundamentally, qualitatively different experiences during this interaction.
In the story that Bob is telling inside his own head, he’s experiencing an unusually high need for emotional support, and also his mental model of Alice is such that he believes Alice would want to provide that support, if she were in full possession of all the facts. When Bob made his initial ask, it was treated as a humdrum, everyday request, and he hastened to clarify that these were extraordinary circumstances. Please, he was saying—I knew before I even asked that this request might be costly. I took that into account before approaching you, and despite the high cost, I’m still asking for support, because this is one of those times when it really makes a difference.
Alice, on the other hand, is in the middle of a much murkier narrative. In the story she’s experiencing, Bob approached her with a reasonable request, and she offered a reasonable response, well within the range of their normal interactions.
But then, something unusual happened—Bob went off script. He made a second request, and furthermore, his second request was identical to the first one, without any accommodation for or compromise with her newly revealed preference. Please, she hears Bob saying—I know that you don’t want to give me emotional support, and that knowledge hasn’t changed anything for me.
There are maybe a dozen reasons why Bob might take such a tack. Perhaps he’s emotionally insensitive, and doesn’t consider others’ needs valid or important. Perhaps he’s socially awkward, and missed what (to Alice) seemed like a clear and unmistakable signal.
Or perhaps (she might tell herself) Bob’s really in trouble. Perhaps this is one of those moments when he might break, if there’s no one there to catch him, no one for him to lean on. Perhaps she’s morally obligated to accede to his request, if she wants to keep on thinking of herself as a good friend and a good person—perhaps she’s supposed to give him the hug no matter how much she doesn’t feel like it, because there’s an infinite term on the other side of the equation.
This same dynamic can hold for other forms of relationship—for instance, if Bob and Alice are coworkers, and Alice is being asked to take on some extra piece of work. Is this really a situation where I’m allowed to refuse? Alice might ask herself. Is it fair that I have to refuse twice, before that refusal is accepted?
If this is their first such interaction, of course, then Alice-as-painted-above is a bit of a strawman, jumping to conclusions and making a big deal out of nothing. But if Bob makes a habit of such requests, or if he’s known to be less emotionally stable than Alice—say, because he’s still recovering from a stressful event in the past six months—then it’s entirely reasonable for her to start connecting the dots in this way.
And unless Alice and Bob have unusually robust and mature communication norms, Bob’s unlikely to ever get the chance to clarify further. The very nature of the ambiguity puts pressure on Alice to shoulder the mantle of responsibility—to be the “adult” in the situation—which means that she’s far less likely than usual to make him aware of the calculations going on in the back of her mind. Probably Bob would be dismayed, to know that Alice is considering treating him with kid gloves—but part of treating someone with kid gloves is not telling them that you’re treating them with kid gloves.
Part III: Coferences
Part of my goal in outlining the above is simply to make more people aware of this dynamic (and thus better able to recognize, ameliorate, and avoid it). I’ve been on both sides of iterated asks, and hated each independently, and it wasn’t until I experienced them in quick succession that I gained empathy for both sides at once.
When I’ve been in Bob’s shoes, I’ve been frustrated by the degree to which people jump to conclusions and won’t just talk straight with me—by the way in which they create huge social distortions out of simple requests, or build persistent narratives that I can’t escape no matter what I do.
And when I’ve been in Alice’s shoes, I’ve felt the confusion and panic of not knowing just how much power—and therefore responsibility—the other person has just handed me. I’ve found myself wanting to tiptoe or freeze, so I don’t accidentally break things. I’ve felt a strong impulse to go far into the red—to give way too much in the immediate moment, if it’ll discharge my moral obligation or stave off a crisis—or to break off the relationship entirely, so I don’t have to deal with the strain of constant wariness.
If fear is the mind-killer, then wariness is the love-killer, the trust-killer, the authenticity-killer. As I become more and more wary, I’m more and more careful about each of my thoughts, statements, and actions. I start to curate more deliberately—sifting among all of my possible responses, and choosing the ones I think will have the most positive effect.
This is the opposite of being present and authentic—when I’m curating the image I present to you, I’m deliberately limiting your access to me-as-a-person. You’re not seeing my thoughts, you’re seeing the thoughts I deem appropriate to show you, based on my explicit model of how you’ll react.
Several bad things are happening, here. First, I’m no longer treating you as an equal—I’m making unilateral, executive decisions about what you can or can’t handle, what you do and don’t deserve to know. Either we aren’t equals, which sucks, or we are and I’m mistreating you, which also sucks.
Second, I’m vastly increasing my own cognitive overhead, because instead of simply responding naturally through intuition and reflex, I now have to run everything through filters and simulations, and if I’m doing my job right I’m not only simulating you, but also your simulation of me and your simulation of me’s simulation of you. In addition to being slow, this is exhausting, which means that—second by second—I’m conditioning myself away from future conversations with you, rather than toward them.
Finally, I’m missing out on you. Whatever makes you cool and interesting, whatever sets you apart from everyone else, whatever thoughts you’re having that I’ve never dreamed of—I’m going to miss all of that, because I’m focusing all of my attention on controlling the situation. It’s as if you’re a shark, and I’m in the ocean with you—I’m not going to be able to notice your grace and beauty the way I would if my immediate survival weren’t in question.
If there’s a generalized solution to this dynamic, I haven’t found it yet. I was recently handed one useful tool, though, which I’m calling coferences until my ally Andrew Critch gives me a better handle for it.
The basic idea of a coference is simple, for all that it takes some twisty sentences to say: a lot of the time, people don’t actually have opinions or preferences at all. Instead, what they have are potential preferences that are contingent upon the preferences of others—except that the other people don’t have preferences either.
For example, I might have a preference for eating at a Chinese restaurant tonight. If so, I might make that preference known to the group, and then we might discover that Alice has a preference against Chinese, and Bob has a preference for tacos.
In this case, at least one person is going to lose, at least a little. We can try to weigh the relative strengths of our preferences against one another, and choose the least offensive option (and we should, if we’re actually good friends).
But there’s another possibility, which is that I have a coference for Chinese food. In this case, I want Chinese if and only if Alice and Bob do, as well. By registering her dispreference, Alice isn’t costing me anything, because I literally did not want it unless she did, too. If she tries to push for Chinese anyway, in a fit of friendly altruism, she’s actually doing a thing that I specifically don’t want, and making the evening slightly worse for both of us. If, on the other hand, we end up eating tacos, I’ll experience zero disappointment.
I’ve settled on the word “coference” because there’s actually no preference at all—only the potential for one. As it turns out, a startlingly large number of things I’d been referring to as preferences were actually coferences all along, and the ability to clearly express them as such would have made a major difference in many of my interactions.
For instance, I recently spent a year in which a good portion of my attention was taken up by attempts to turn a specific friendship into something more durable and meaningful (whether romantic or platonic). There were a number of factors that made this a long shot, but possibly the least-necessary and most self-defeating of them was a neediness narrative based (at least in part) on my inability to express coferences clearly.
Represented in the graph above are various important moments—a couple of personal crises, a few explicit bids for greater intimacy, some unrelated stresses that happened to bleed over in a perceptible way. Most (though not all) of those moments were interpreted as signals of neediness, and came with a corresponding increase in my friend’s level of wariness.
Many of those moments were “real,” in the sense that I endorse my friend’s interpretation of them, and think that their wariness more or less appropriately matched the signals I was sending. I can think of at least one example, though, in which the confusion between preferences and coferences caused wariness that didn’t have to be there. In a probing conversation, my friend asked me outright what my goals were vis à vis our relationship. My response?
“Maximize opportunities to interact with you.”
In point of fact, what I was experiencing was a coference for more interaction—I’d found all of our conversations to that point to be fun, challenging, interesting, and mutually beneficial, and so to the degree that they felt the same, I saw good reason to seek out more of them.
But of course, the actual sentence I uttered really can’t help but be interpreted as needy, especially given the already-extant narrative. It entirely failed to communicate my preference for avoiding interactions motivated by duty, concern, sympathy, guilt, or any of half a dozen other responses to neediness.
I don’t think coferences do anything at all in situations where the neediness is genuinely felt and correctly perceived—it’s entirely possible, for example, that this particular friendship would have broken down due to wariness regardless.
But they certainly help reduce needy-wary spirals that come about as a result of clumsy communication. Coferences are “wanty” by nature—properly expressed and understood, they push relationships away from confusion, constraint, and coercion, and toward clarity, choice, and authenticity.
In the end, if there’s a single, coherent lesson to take away from all of this, I think it’s basically:
That’s a pretty vague and complex goal—for one thing, the concepts above are useful tools for increasing communication and empathy, but they don’t address the sources of neediness. For another, they’re pretty heavily dependent on introspection and self-awareness, which are often in short supply in times of stress and struggle.
But if it’s not exactly a target, it’s at least a direction, and it’s one I’ve already benefitted from moving in. If you happen to have relevant thoughts, I’d sure like to hear them.
(But only if you want me to, of course.)
Edit/update: some excellent responders have pointed out the high value of neediness in the correct contexts. For instance, committed and loving long-term partners will probably have a much better relationship if they’ve managed to let themselves need one another, and leaned against each other in a way that matches their mutual desire-to-give. I 100% agree; turning neediness into wantiness is good for not overpressuring new relationships, but isn’t a universally healthy strategy by any means. There’s a thing where wantiness creates a healthy ability to walk away at basically any time, but certain good and desirable relationships/projects/goals require that option to be closed.
*And if you do try to address them, you risk setting up a whole other narrative (you’re controlling, you’re anal, you always blow things out of proportion, you view everything in the worst possible light, can’t we just have one conversation that doesn’t get bogged down in some stupid, tiny thing?).
