Or is your partner having mercy sex with you?
NEW SERIES: Nurses and Relationships
Before we figure out if you’re a person someone else could want, ask yourself this:
How do YOU finally come to believe that you’re a person someone could want?
All relationships with other people start with . . . your relationship with yourself.
Self Relationships
It’s challenging — to say the least — to enjoy a healthy relationship with another person when you don’t have a healthy relationship with yourself.
If you are not connected to yourself and understand your own emotions and desires, then how can you successfully connect with another person? How can you adequately share the deepest and most vulnerable parts of yourself?
Relationships with ourselves should include things like:
— Caring for your own basic needs such as getting enough sleep and rest, exercising, and eating nutritional foods.
— Prioritizing activities that make you happy and bring you joy. Making time for yourself and feeding your inner world.
— Being your own best friend. When life gets hard and negativity piles up, you should treat yourself like you would a friend or family member. Offer encouragement and empathy. Inquire about what’s bothering you and really listen, without judgment.
Since your relationship with you is the only relationship you’re guaranteed to have every single day of your life, it’s crucial to cultivate a positive relationship with yourself.
Other Relationships
Now that you know how you should be treating yourself, are you a person you would want in your life?
Do you appreciate your accomplishments and forgive your past failures?
Do you understand that no one is perfect; do you extend grace and patience toward yourself?
If so, you’re in a good relationship with yourself and you most likely feel that you’re the type of person you would want to be in a relationship with. That’s great!
But wanting is only part of the relationship story.
Let’s take a deep dive into wanting in relationships.
Wanting is tied to longing, craving, and wishing.
But wanting requires energy and effort. First, you have to want, then you get to see how things pan out. But the wantingalways comes first.
Wanting is hard because it sets up an internal “unsatisfied” state of being.
It involves deprivation and, suddenly, you’re feeling as if something is lacking or as if you’re doing without something very important to you.
Wanting in intimate relationships can get sticky because wanting is the difference between human sexual interaction and the sexual desires of other species.
You can want your partner but not want to have sex.
You can want to have sex but not want your partner.
Intent is tremendously important in intimate relationships and sexual wanting. If you don’t want your partner, how do you know when you want to have sex with them? If they’re having sex with you and don’t really want you, are they having mercy sex with you? Is that what you want?
Choosing
Humans have the capacity to cherish other humans. It’s part of what makes us unique.
This elevates the wanting beyond infatuation or lust — this means wanting the best for another person and acting in their best interest.
When we’re choosing, we realize that wanting isn’t desiring your partner to do something for you. It’s not about possessiveness and jealousy.
Instead, wanting your partner is about your desire for his or her welfare and happiness. Your wanting surfaces as seeking his or her best interests, regardless of whether they line up with your own.
The largest part of wanting in an intimate relationship is the choosing.
Wanting allows you to choose the person — the one person — from all the other persons you could possibly want.
Yes, choosing is a decision, a selection, a deliberate act of the will.
Part of knowing who you are is knowing what you want and eventually choosing — with the realization that when you make one choice, you must forgo other options.
Choice is a primary function of your self-hood.
Choice is how you define yourself.
Choosing is how you become the person you — and someone else — could want.
Being Chosen vs Being Wanted
When you choose someone, suddenly their significance grows exponentially, and for those who do not have a solid relationship with themselves, this importance for another person can throw a wrench into the relationship.
When another person becomes more important to you than your own self, you are suddenly in a vulnerable position.
When you choose someone and choose to make them important to you, that doesn’t mean they are more important to you than you are to you. It means you value them enough to limit your choice to them alone. It doesn’t mean you are choosing that person over you.
Choosing isn’t about not being able to make up your mind, it’s about being able to handle the level of importance another person has in your life while you hold on to your own importance. Without the ability to hold on to yourself or to know who you are and what you know, you will be afraid to choose, even if you do want.
In order to be a person someone could want, you have to be a person who wants from the best part of who you are and not from a place of neediness or guilt.
As you become a person who makes definitive choices, you begin to feel worthy, you begin to see yourself as a person who could be chosen by another.
When you are the person who chooses to collaborate with a person you’ve chosen and love, you become a person someone can could choose, and that’s how you become the person someone wants.
But you don’t want to be the person someone simply wants.
You want to be the person someone chooses to want.
You don’t want someone else to settle for living with you or having sex with you. You want that someone to choose you.
We all want to be chosen and none of us want to settle for maybe being wanted.
Be That Person
To be the person someone could want . . .
- Hold on to yourself. We aren’t a species where one person decides and the other goes along. Having the courage to choose what’s important to you and what you want in life is the best way to foster your relationship with yourself, which is a crucial piece of the puzzle in our relationships with others.
- Make Good Life Choices. Choices are what make us unique. From our favorite sports teams and foods to the career paths and vacation spots we seek — choices define us. It’s no different when it comes to choosing the humans we people our lives with. We make choices for them to be in our lives or not to be in our lives day after day after day . . .
- Don’t Fear Wanting. Wanting is part of relationships and desire is part of wanting. Human sexual desire is more than simply desiring sex, it’s about choosing to desire your partner. If we’re lucky, the things we want eventually force us to become more than who we are, creating better versions of ourselves over time. Versions we treasure and hold on to . . . all the while becoming the type of person someone could want.
