On partners and "meeting all my needs"

[serene]

We're having an interesting conversation on alt.poly that's been had before, but I wrote more in the thread than I usually do, and with snippy's permission, I'm reprinting some of the discussion under the cut (with some line breaks added to make it a bit more readable than my original post).



[snippy] wrote:

>On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:51:15 -0700, Serene <ser...@serenepages.org>
>wrote:

>>In my own experience, a thousand people can't meet my needs. Only one
>>can -- me. My partners are not in my life because they meet my needs.
>>They're in my life because they're neat people who consent to be in my
>>life. I feel like an alien when people talk about the
>>meeting-all-my-needs aspect of polyamory, because I honestly just do
>>not think of it that way at all.

>Where, if anywhere, does "humans are social animals" fit into this, in
>your opinion?

>Maybe it's a genuine difference, maybe it's a perception difference,
>or maybe it's just miscommunication, but I cannot conceive of meeting
>my needs by myself. I am a social creature: I need other people. I
>need social contact of some kind, and I am not healthy when I am alone
>too much. Nor do I live like hermit, independent of the efforts of
>other people in society, the ones who create and transport and sell
>the things I need to live (food and water, clothing, shelter). And
>both of those are what I understand as the meaning of the words you
>wrote, and I'm struggling to understand.


I think it's possible we're talking about two different things, but I
may be wrong. I think that I need human contact in order to thrive.
By that I mean that I think I need some affectionate contact with some
humans in order for my life to be happiest. (To be honest, the only
way to test that thought would be to go *without* any human contact,
and I wouldn't know where to begin trying that, nor do I want to, so I
will just take it as a given that I do best with human contact of some
sort.) Not specific contact from specific people, but some positive
contact with some number of people on a fairly ongoing basis.

What I perceive people are talking about when they say, "I have more
than one partner because no one partner can meet all my needs" is that
there are things that some people perceive they need in order to be
happy, and that if partner A doesn't meet them all, then they feel a
need to go find another partner or partners to fill in that lack. To
me, that seems as though the focus is somewhere that it isn't for me
(which I hope you'll believe isn't feeling to me like they're wrong
and I'm right).

For me, my life is about going through my days doing
the best I can to be happy, and if I'm happy around partner A, I want
to be around partner A, and it never occurs to me to think "Gosh,
partner A doesn't do X for me, so I need another partner to do that
for me," or even "Gosh, so glad I found partner A to do X with,
because what would I do if I didn't have an X partner?" (Which is not
to say I don't sometimes say to a partner, "It's nice to have someone
to watch movies with", just that it never occurs to me in partner
selection to enumerate what needs my partner may be likely to
fulfill.)

If I were lacking in someone to do X with, what I would tend to do is
go about meeting X in the best way I know how, or just adjusting to
not having X in my life -- it would never occur to me to try to find a
person to provide X for me.

Exceptions are certain social activities that can be met by hanging
out in groups dedicated to them. I mean, if I wanted to go dancing (I
don't, but if I did) and none of my partners wanted to do it with me,
I am *far* more likely to join a local dance club than to go looking
for a partner or other person to go dancing with. Or to go dancing
alone. It just wouldn't occur to me to think "I need a partner who
dances." I wouldn't even know how to go about selecting partners for
which of my needs they might fulfill.

By the way, I'm not certain I'm not approaching this question from an
unhealthy mental/emotional space. I'm aware, for instance, that I have
a fetish about doing things for myself (largely due to issues over
having been abandoned by my father) that sometimes gets in the way of
asking for things even when I badly need them.

Also, I'm not even sure I'm accurately viewing my way of doing things.
I was surprised to find that in my livejournal shortly before I
started seeing new people (when I was with cute-poet-chick), I wrote
about wanting more romance in my life. I remember wanting that, and
then shortly thereafter, I had new partners, but I don't remember
thinking of myself as "looking for new partner(s)".

Comments

[flippac.livejournal.com]

I've gone looking for "someone to play with" before, and felt that there were specific emotional needs attached to that - not least not having to top all the time. What actually happened was H and I started playing - we'd been friends for a couple of years.