Blog 625 – 05.07.2017
The Most Fearful Admission, To Need And To Be Needed

For some years now I have shied away from the “N” word, that one too, but I mean the other big no-no word for many guys at least, “Need.” I remember pointing out on several occasions that the Barbra Streisand’s song that says, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world” was all wrong. But something I saw in the wonderful book and movie, “The Shack” has caused me to rethink that position. Papa or God says to Mack that He/She is incomplete without even one of Her/His children. If God needs us to be complete it stands to reason for a guy even as thick headed as I am that we need not only God but each other to be complete ourselves. When I was a young man in love with that first pretty girl I fell for I used to write in love poems and letters the lover’s triple crown, “I love you. I want you. I need you.” And I remember feeling all three of those things quite freely and strongly.

In the great romantic movie Sabrina in both incarnations, the nineteen fifties version starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden and the nineteen ninties version starring Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond, and Greg Kinnear, the male lead playing the rich and powerful corporate giant, Linus Larrabee, who falls for the lovely chauffeurs daughter, Sabrina Fairchild, says to her in the end of the movie, “I told your father that I need you and I don’t need anything.” Women are much smarter than men in a lot of ways. And maybe that is because their ego’s don’t confuse them with false logic so easily when it comes to the  importance of needing and being needed.” For many women loving is all about needing and being needed like their relationships with their babies and what are the men in their lives but big babies who need them just as desperately as the little babies? Often daddies see that more in their daughters than their sons but again that is that confusing macho ego thing again mostly with boys and men. We just have a hard time, us guys,  admitting that we need anything or anyone, and when someone acts like they needs us it scares us and makes us want to run away.

Needing is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Just as surrender is not a sign of weakness but of strength. And guys I know how counterintuitive that sounds, but remember women are much better with that intuitive stuff than we are as a rule. I heard a man bad mouthing women a at the counter at a cafe I frequent. He said loud enough to hear to no one in particular, “Women, you just can’t trust them to think straight.” I didn’t say anything but wondered if he felt that way about his mother, his sister, or if he had been wounded by a romance gone wrong. Often our opinions are based more on our pain than logic or intuition. The man who yells loudest I don’t need anyone or anything usually can’t find matching socks without help and desperately longs to hear a sweet voice saying, “I love you, Baby, only
you can satisfy the need in me.” And he’d do just about anything to hear that from time to time. It is a need even macho guys have – the need to feel not just loved and wanted but needed.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White