What Bartending Taught Me About Wants and Needs
Many of us know what we don't want long before we know what we do.
Posted June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
For 11 years, I worked at a popular bar in Los Angeles, and one of the things I noticed working there as long as I did was that most people know what they don't want, but few really know what they want.
It was common for someone to sit down, ask for a menu, and look through it making comments about all the things they didn't want, spending so much time trying to decide what they actually wanted.
Similarly, whenever I ask a client about his wants or his needs, the look I get back is like a deer in headlights. Most of us don't know what we want or need, let alone understand the difference between the two.
Distinguishing Between Wants and Needs
A need is something fundamental to our psychological and emotional wellbeing. Maslow's hierarchy of needs places safety, love, belonging, and esteem among our core human needs. When those needs go unmet in childhood , a child doesn't develop the secure attachment necessary for him to feel worthy of love, to feel safe in the world, and to trust other people.
Without a secure foundation, he’s more likely to grow up struggling with low self-worth and difficulty feeling secure in his relationships. He may not even feel deserving of asking for what he needs or wants, because he's gotten so used to never having them met.
A want, on the other hand, is a desire—something that adds meaning, pleasure, or joy to our lives, but whose absence doesn't affect our development and our sense of self the way an unmet need does.
British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's concept of the true self and the false self helps explain why so many gay men struggle to identify their wants and needs.
In Winnicott's formulation, the true self represents the authentic core of the personality , the part of us that contains our genuine feelings, needs, and spontaneous experience (Winnicott, 1960). He described the false self as a defensive organization that develops when a child's authentic expressions of need, emotion , and spontaneity are consistently unmet, ignored, or punished by the caregiving environment. In response, the child learns to hide what is real and present what is considered acceptable instead.
The false self isn't pathological in origin but is a survival response. Winnicott distinguished between healthy social adaptation, which everyone engages in to some degree, and pathological false self organization, where the false self has replaced authentic expression and the person loses touch with the true self.
When we're used to living from the false self instead of the true self, we feel a sense of disconnection that can lead to a chronic loneliness . It also prevents us from knowing what we want and truly need.
Why Gay Boys Grow Up Suppressing Their True Selves
Because many gay boys grew up in environments where there was little to no affirmation of their identity , they often felt the need to suppress parts of themselves to fit in. Without explicit signs of acceptance, a gay boy may hide any form of femininity, emotional vulnerability, desire, or natural interests, and instead adopt traits that he believes align with societal expectations of boys.
This process of self-suppression involves adapting to heteronormative expectations before he understands what he's feeling. Over time, internalized self-blame becomes a defense mechanism to protect caregivers and systems that fail to offer affirming support.
Winnicott observed that when the true self is sufficiently hidden in childhood, the adult who emerges can struggle to feel a genuine sense of self in relationships, and can feel chronically unseen or unknown even when surrounded by people who genuinely care about them (Winnicott, 1960). This describes a far too common experience for many of my clients and is something I've heard from gay male friends as well.
One client recently told me that whether he's at a bar or with a group of other gay men at a social outing, he still feels as though he doesn't belong. Although he's lived in West Hollywood for decades and has no problem meeting men, he describes feeling like a ghost wherever he goes.
Chances are, many gay boys didn't know any other gay boys growing up, and so they developed a feeling of being terminally unique, the belief, born from years of feeling different, that no one else could understand what they were going through, let alone what they needed or wanted.
From a clinical perspective, feeling terminally unique only reinforces a sense of separation, a separation felt for so long that it follows many gay men into adulthood, leaving them alone even in their closest relationships.
When we've spent years feeling like no one could possibly understand us, we stop expecting to be understood, and when we stop expecting to be understood, we lose touch with what we want or even need.
If you're someone who has spent more of your life knowing what you don't want than knowing what you do, whether at a restaurant or in a relationship, I’d invite you to ask yourself—what does your true self want, and what does your true self need?
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. New York, NY: International Universities Press.
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Chris Tompkins, LMFT , specializes in working with adult gay men. He is also the author of the award-winning book Raising LGBTQ Allies: A Parent’s Guide to Changing the Messages from the Playground .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.