You Don’t Have To Lose Your Independence To Love Someone

In all our lives, we have in someway or the other desired to be nurtured, babied, cared for without efforts on our parts, by people stronger than us who have our interests truly at heart. No matter how strong, caring, responsible we are – if we clearly contemplate within, the wish to be taken care of for a change will be present.

For most of us these desires and emotions do not rule our lives entirely. But when they do rule our lives and dictate our existence, then we have more than just dependency needs, we are DEPENDENT. ‘I cannot live without you’ ‘I love him/her so much its impossible’ ‘I’ll die if you leave me’ ‘I am nothing without you’ ‘You complete me’ ‘I need you because I love you’ Í love you because I need you’ These statements are not just limited to everyday couples, but they are romanticized endlessly in Bollywood and Hollywood movies. Devdas, Jerry Maguire, 500 days of summer, all serve to reinforce this misconception.

I cannot live without you translates into I love you so much. Which is very wrong and harmful.

This is PARASITISM, not love. When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in the relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Dependency can be defined as the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another. In marriage, there is normally a differentiation of the roles of the two spouses, a normally efficient division of labor between them. Healthy couples instinctively will switch roles from time to time. The man may cook a meal now and then, clean the house to surprise his wife; the woman may get a part time job or take over the billing/paying for a year.

This process diminishes their mutual dependency. But for dependent people, the loss of other is such a frightening prospect, that they seek to increase rather than diminish mutual dependency so as to make marriage more rather than less of a TRAP. I have met many people, who cherish the fact that their spouse/partner/children cannot function without them. This deeply saddens me, as they go on nurturing this dependency and parasitism rather than being strong and independent individuals. They never see this as a problem, which is the MAIN PROBLEM.

If you grew up in a household where your parents neglected, abused or didn’t love you enough, you may have entered into adulthood with a deep sense of insecurity. A feeling of I am not good enough, I am not enough, I am not loved enough are common occurrences then. But after absorbing this information, try to understand that if you scramble for love, care and attention and cling to it like a life raft, it will bring out the worst in you.

The desperation to preserve and hold onto the relationship will actually lead to unloving, manipulative behavior that will destroy the very relationship you are trying to preserve.

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of ANTI LOVE. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism (treating someone as if they are a child so that they start acting like one) rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than build people.

So, readers, understand this : allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the WORST possible thing you can do to yourself. If you expect the other person to make you happy all the time, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.

If being loved is your primary goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love.