For a long time i gravitated toward relationships where i was needed. Friends who relied on me heavily. Partners who seemed lost without my involvement in every decision. I told myself this meant i mattered deeply to these people, that being essential to someone was the same thing as being genuinely loved by them.
t took falling apart in one particular relationship to realise those two things are not the same at all.
Being needed often just means you are useful. You solve problems, provide stability, fill a gap that exists in someone's life. And there is nothing wrong with being helpful to people you care about. But when the entire foundation of a relationship is your usefulness, the moment you need something back, the moment you are not in a position to keep solving and stabilising and fixing, the relationship reveals what it actually was.
Real love does not disappear when you stop being useful. It does not require you to constantly perform value to justify your presence in someone's life. It simply wants you there, capable or struggling, helpful or temporarily unable to help, because the connection was never actually about function in the first place.
I had to unlearn a lot of behaviour built around earning my place in relationships. Always being the one who shows up first, gives the most, asks for the least, because somewhere along the way i had decided that was the price of being kept around.
That is exhausting, and it is also not love. It is a transaction dressed up to look like one.
Now i pay attention to how people treat me when i am not being useful to them. When i cannot fix their problem, show up for the favour, or carry the emotional weight that week. The people who stay through that, without resentment, without distance, those are the ones who were actually there for me and not for what i provided.
Being needed feels good for a while. But being loved without conditions attached to your usefulness, that is the thing actually worth building a life around.
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