Needing vs Wanting vs Loving Someone: How to Tell the Difference

Wanting someone is desire: you are drawn to them and would choose them. Needing someone is dependence: they have become part of your sense of safety, and their absence would hurt. Love, in its fullest form, usually holds both at once, together with a conscious decision to stay. Trouble starts when one of these remains and the others have quietly gone, and it can be surprisingly hard to tell from the inside.

That was the dilemma behind a widely shared essay by writer Keay Nigel for Elite Daily. Below is the story that prompted it, his way of separating want from need, and what relationship research adds, along with some practical questions for anyone asking themselves the same thing.

The phone call that started it

Nigel describes a close friend who rang to say she was ending a six-year relationship. She had met her fiancé in her first year of university; he was her first boyfriend. They stayed together through graduation, travelled around Europe, survived about a year of long distance when work took her to another state, moved back to the same city, got engaged and began house hunting. From the outside, and certainly on social media, it looked like a storybook.

Then her feelings changed. Her question to him was simple and painful: how do you know whether you still love someone, or whether you are staying because it is familiar? He asked for a minute to think, and his answer became the essay.

Wanting versus needing

Nigel's illustration is everyday. You might want a designer handbag without needing it, and that desire can be faint or overwhelming. Oxygen is the opposite: you rarely feel any desire for it, yet you cannot live without it. The two can merge. Someone underwater suddenly wants air with every fibre of their body. We often recognise how much we need something only when it is threatened.

His definition of love grows from this: "Love is when you want what you need and need what you want." Most relationships begin in wanting, with attraction and excitement. Over time, as two lives intertwine, wanting is joined by need. The other person becomes a refuge, the one who accepts you, the place where you feel safe. When both are present together, Nigel argues, you have love.

He is honest about the risk. A refuge can also become a trap. Needing someone so deeply that you feel unable to function without them leaves you vulnerable, and after a breakup it is natural to feel needy simply because the familiar comfort has gone.

What psychology adds: intimacy, passion and commitment

Nigel's want-and-need model maps neatly onto one of the best-known frameworks in relationship science. In 1986, psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed the triangular theory of love, built on three components:

• Passion: attraction, excitement and physical desire, close to what Nigel calls wanting.
• Intimacy: closeness, trust and the feeling of being known, much of what makes someone feel needed and safe.
• Commitment: the decision to love someone and keep choosing them over time.

Combinations produce different kinds of love. Passion alone is infatuation. Intimacy with commitment but little passion is companionate love, common in long marriages and close friendships, and not a failure in itself. Commitment with neither of the others is what Sternberg called empty love. Having all three is consummate love, the ideal most of us picture.

Attachment research adds another layer. Since psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver applied attachment theory to adult romance in 1987, studies have described how people with an anxious attachment style crave reassurance and fear abandonment, and may stay in long but unhappy relationships for that reason. In other words, sometimes what feels like love is mostly fear of being alone.

Love, nostalgia or comfortable habit?

Nigel's friend admitted that her head no longer wanted her fiancé as a partner, yet her heart still ached for him. His reply was that she was feeling nostalgia rather than love. Getting back together might bring relief for a while, he warned, but it would not last, because he was no longer what she wanted. Staying for safety alone, in his words, would mean gambling her future happiness.

He acknowledges it is easy to set high standards for someone else's life, since he would not be the one living with the consequences. Leaving the person you planned to marry is hard. He still thought it beat walking away on the wedding day, and said he would follow the same advice himself.

If you are in a similar place, some questions may help:

• If you met this person today, as they are now, would you choose them?
• When you imagine the next five years together, do you feel warmth or dread?
• Is it the person you miss when apart, or the routine, the home and the shared friends?
• Are you staying mainly because leaving feels frightening?
• Have you both actually talked about what has changed?

Honest answers do not automatically mean breaking up. Passion often dips in long relationships and can be rebuilt with attention, novelty and sometimes a couples counsellor. But they can show you whether there is still something there to rebuild.

Myths about wanting, needing and loving

• "If the spark fades, it was never love." Intense early passion naturally settles. Many lasting couples describe a deeper, calmer love that replaced it.
• "Needing someone is unhealthy." Depending on a partner for comfort is part of a secure bond. The problem is dependence so total that you lose yourself, or stay purely out of fear.
• "Lust and love are the same thing." Desire is part of romantic love but cannot define it alone. Feelings shift; commitment is a choice.

Choosing the love you deserve

Nigel argues that love is rarely black and white, and that most of it lives in the grey. Desire can flare and fade. Need without desire may be nostalgia or simple inertia. Neither, on its own, is reason enough to build a life on.

He closes with a familiar line from Stephen Chbosky's 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "We accept the love we think we deserve." His advice to his friend, and to readers, is not to settle out of fear and not to be afraid of stepping outside a comfort zone to find a better fit. Take time to think it through. Some decisions are worth getting right even if they come late.

Sources: Essay by Keay Nigel for Elite Daily; Triangular theory of love; Attachment in adults; The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

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