People Who Need People Are Miserable People

In the book "Path to No Self" Bernadette Roberts tells how she was taught by her parents to avoid the misery that comes from "needing people". When I read that book over 25 years ago I was intrigued by the comment but would have to go through a number of painful relationships to come to understand the meaning of "not needing people" in the sense Roberts meant it.

It seems to me that almost everyone is brought up in such a way as to have a hole in the soul, so to speak, and taught to looked outside ourselves to fill it. And although it is most common to look to another human being to fulfill our inner void, it is not only to another human being that we look. It can be to almost anything really; our jobs, our recreation, our pets...anything and everything can be used fill the hole of unhappiness we experience without it. But mainly, it is to another that we look for "fulfilling love".

The problem with looking outside ourselves for fulfillment is that nothing in the material world is permanent. Lovers come and go, marriages dissolve, pets die, jobs are lost, businesses fail, boats sink and when they do, we are once again left alone and unhappy. Why? Precisely because we have depended upon the impermanent for our happiness. When these are gone, so is our happiness. It is amazing how long it took me to understand this...how many failed relationships and how much pain it took to see what was happening.

What I have come to learn through painful trial and error is there is nothing outside myself that can give me lasting happiness and joy. Nothing outside myself is permanent. I have learned that having a true sense of purpose, of having real sense of worth and finding permanent happiness must be found within, and carried with me where ever I go. Happiness and fulfillment found in this way can never be taken away, no matter what happens on the outside. The eternal is always and the most important thing I've realized is that when we are capable of being happy and secure human beings completely unto ourselves first, in relationship with that which is Permanent, then, and only then are we truly capable of being in any kind of relationship outside ourselves in a proper way. When we are attached to that which is within and permanent, we will never become attached to that which is without and impermanent. Love is free and without a hint of selfishness or strings. Love does not cling or need, for love is already complete and fulfills.

All misery, it seems to me, has it roots in the human being that suck selfishly and needfully, from people, places or things, for that which it should seek to have from have within. The greatest misery of all comes when two unfulfilled, needy human beings come together with high expectations, and great emotional excitement at the promise of mutual fulfillment, only to discover in the end, that neither really had much more to give, after all, than only a promise to fulfill. But how can that which is empty and needy give what is does not have and is in need of itself?

Great is our disappointment, and even anger, when we discover the truth that our lover does not have what he promised to give. The preponderance of divorce and failed relationships of all kinds is evidence to this truth. Yet this truth, painful as it is, can also become the key to understanding and finding the means to have a proper and truly rewarding relationship with another. After all, we are a tribal species, we are not meant to live in isolation but there is a right way and a wrong way of relating to each other. When two fulfilled people come together, perhaps rising from the ashes of a relationship gone wrong, they become much more than the sum of themselves. Their flame of love, for each other and for the world, is far greater than the whole. Would that the world would see much more of such love.