FRANCES: I'm leaving you, Arthur. The only way I can survive is to get away from you.
ARTHUR: How can you simply run away? What about the vows you made to me? Doesn't your commitment mean anything to you?
FRANCES: Yes, Arthur, I've kept that commitment for twenty-two years. Now I need to keep another commitment.
ARTHUR: What commitment? How could you have another commitment?
FRANCES: I need to keep a commitment to myself, Arthur, can you understand that? To myself.
ARTHUR: How about me, Frances, have you thought of what you owe me?
FRANCES: Yes, Arthur, I've thought a lot about what I owe you, but right now I owe myself even more.
A lot of people are acting out this script these days. And a lot more fretting about it. It suits the temper of our culture: "I've got to take care of myself."
Frances says that she is committed to herself. But what does she have in mind? Is she committed to her needs? Or is she only committed to her desires? And does she really know the difference?
There comes a time in every committed relationship when one person has to give up what he wants so that the other person can get what she needs. But he should not give up what he needs so that the other person can get whatever she wants. A commitment is not a blank check drawn on our needs so that another person can satisfy his or her desires.
The trick is knowing the difference between our needs and our desires.
When we want something badly, we feel as if we truly need it. The more addicted we are to things we desire, the more they feel like needs. A smoker only wants a cigarette, but she feels as if she needs it. A compulsive spender only wants to buy something, but he feels as if he really needs it. We are all in the same boat, one way or the other; we have a hard time seeing the difference between what we need and what we want.
Knowing that there is a difference comes with maturity. Knowing it is also crucial to the success of committed relationships. But nobody knows the difference with scientific precision. And we all get confused when our own desires are involved.
Let's try a rough definition. Needs are what we require for living an essentially human life. Desires are what we require for living a pleasurable life.
Now let's shake our rough definition down to four categories of basic human needs-four things we all need in order to be a functioning human being.
Survival needs: What we need to keep body and spirit together.
Moral needs: What we need to keep a sense of our personal integrity.
Power needs: What we need to take responsibility for our own lives.
Spiritual needs: What we need to relate to God in gratitude and love.
As for desires, the field is wide open. We can want what is good for us. We can want what is bad for us. We might want what other people think anyone would be crazy for having. We might want what almost everybody else wants. Wanting things is a terrific energy; it makes for exciting relationships. But if we confuse our desires with needs, and if our desires get in the way of the other person's needs, we have a conflict on our hands.
Some people sacrifice what they really need to their partners' desires, and put up with the unfairness for years. Then they suddenly discover that its time for keeping their commitment to their own selves, time to tend to their own needs.
Which is what happened to Frances. For many years she surrendered two basic needs to Arthur's compulsive desires. She needed self-respect. And she needed integrity in her life. She surrender them both.
Arthur had a strong desire to live well beyond their means. He drove a luxury car when he could hardly afford a subcompact. He bought four hundred dollar suits when he could hardly afford a new shirt. He also had a compulsion to let Frances know that she was inferior to him, not as well educated, not as talented, not as smart, and generally not quite in his class.
Frances finally decided that it was time to make her move, to keep a commitment to herself. First she tried to persuade Arthur that she had a deep need to respect herself, and that she needed financial honesty in her life. She tried for five years, but he would not change or could not change.
Failing to persuade him, she separated from him, to find her self-respect and, in the bargain, to gain some integrity in her life.
Arthur appealed to her commitment, and brought God in to support his case. She countered by saying that God had awakened her, as a person aroused from coma, to her commitment to herself, and to what she needed.
Frances saw her conflict this way: all the years of their relationship, Arthur had pushed his two desires up against two of her needs, and her needs had always given way. Now she resisted. She had a survival need to respect herself; she bucked this need up against his desire to feel superior. She had a moral need to live with integrity; she bucked this need up against his desire to look rich while they could not pay their bills. And she determined to no longer surrender these needs to Arthur's desires.
Of course Arthur felt as if he really needs the things he wanted-to look rich and to feel superior to Frances. Neurotic feelings, yes, but real to him. He was certain that they had a conflict because she pitted her desires against his needs.
It might have help had both Frances and Arthur observed four basic ground rules for setting between needs and desires.
Desires give way to needs. If getting what I want prevents you from getting what you need, I give up what I want so that you can meet your needs.
Needs do not give way to desires. If getting what I need prevents you from getting what you want, I do not give in to your desires.
Desires are negotiable. If getting what I want prevents you from getting what you want, we negotiate; neither of us surrender, both of us compromise.
Needs are negotiable. If getting what I need prevents you from getting what you need, we negotiate as equals, from strength to strength; we compromise our less basic needs so that both of us can meet our more basic needs.
If they had both lived by these rules from the beginning, Arthur would not have expected Frances to surrender her needs. And early on Arthur would have seen his neurotic desires for what they were. In any case, Frances now refused to surrender her needs to Arthur's compulsive desires. Nothing could be negotiated unless Arthur gained a better insight into his own desires.
Frances was committed to Arthur. No doubt about that at all. Her conflict had come when she had awaked to a commitment she owed to herself. She had kept faith with Arthur for more than twenty years. But Arthur had never given her permission to be faithful to herself. So she ended the conflict by ending her commitment to Arthur.
Who failed to keep the commitment? Did Frances fail her commitment because he refused to honor the most basic term of all personal commitments-the surrender of our desires when what we want prevents another person from getting what he or she needs?
Sometimes our conflict is between each other's real needs. Not between your needs and my desires, but between your needs and my needs. The concrete question, then, is this: which need is more basic?
Our need to survive is obviously most basic. We need to survive as bodies. But we need to survive as spirits too. If one of us threatens the other's survival, in body or spirit, we may not surrender. Nor may we negotiate. The other person's lesser needs come second to our need to survive.
We have no need that presses harder on the core of our beings than our need to be at peace with the still, small voice of our conscience. It is our need to be at home with our deepest selves, whole, one, in unity with the moral core we sometimes call our heart of hearts. To separate our actions from from our hearts is to slice ourselves and others, how we live our lives, they all have to harmonize with the urgings of our hearts.
We cannot let ourselves surrender this need to anyone else's desires. Our moral needs are not negotiable. If someone to whom we are committed maneuvers us into a surrender, our inner voice will say, "NEVER," and it urges us to listen.
We need to have power, too; for instance, we need the power to make choices that affect our lives. We cannot surrender our power to each other. But power can be negotiated. When your need to be strong gets in the way of my need to be strong, there is nothing for us to do but negotiate from one another's strenghts.
We can compromise our desires without surrendering our needs. We can compromise in our lesser needs without surrendering our basic needs. There is no end to negotiation; we have to keep at it as long as we are keeping commitments to one another. No commitment ever deserves total surrender, not of the things we need in order to keep our personal lives intact. But everything else is open ended. We need to care enough to negotiate. And care enough, too, to keep asking ourselves what the difference is between what we really need and what we only want.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Blessing
In relationships, both partners have needs and they can conflict. This is when problems arise. You want your partner to do x. Your partner wants you to do y. You both feel unhappy. This is a needs conflict Thank you