What Our Needs and Relationships Tell Us About Ourselves
Our needs in relationships reveal what was missing in our past.
Updated February 10, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Needs are requirements for healthy development. We bring needs to our partner and he or she brings needs to us. Our central love-needs might be summarized as: attention , affection, appreciation, acceptance, allowing. These five A’s are the same needs we presented to our parents from our earliest days of life.
Showing these five A’s is true presence in a relationship. They also describe the essential components of love. When they happen between two people, they constitute intimacy . Let’s look at each in detail:
Attention : We ask for an engaged focus on our words, feelings, and experience. We also seek responsiveness to them. We want to be heard and seen for who we are. We want the other to show he gets us. We want ongoing dialogue. When the other person is too caught up in himself, he will not be able to focus on us. Only someone who can transcend his own ego can be attentive. This shows that letting go of ego, a spiritual goal, helps us love. We needed attention in order to survive when we were infants. We need it all through life to thrive.
Affection: The human brain develops in early life through frequent experiences of being held, cuddled, and played with. Our need for physical touch is therefore essential to our growth. We need physical holding with no sexual component in early life. We seek physical holding with a sexual dimension in our adult relationships, when it is appropriate. We need touch all through life, uninhibited but respectful of our boundaries .
Appreciation : To be appreciated is to be valued as precious to others. We need to know we matter. We wanted that from our parents. We want it now in our adult relationships. Appreciation is the opposite of being taken for granted or being treated as if we are invisible. We seek from others a sense of our importance to them. When we don’t find it, we know instinctively that something we truly need is missing. This applies to all the five A’s.
Acceptance : As we grow from infancy into childhood we manifest a unique personality . Our need then is for full acceptance and approval of who we are turning out to be. We do not thrive when parents, or partners later, try to make us what they want us to be. Radical acceptance of us with all our light and dark dimensions is crucial to true love. This welcoming gives us a sense of belonging—crucial to growth since we are social beings.
Allowing : Once we learned to walk on our own and no longer needed to be carried, we were beginning to show independence. We needed parents who could accept that. In healthy development, we stay bonded to family but launch out on our own. We are doing this from the first day of school to the first day of college and then to independent living in the world as full-on adults. In our relationships now we want to be allowed to follow our own deepest needs, values, and wishes. We are already free as citizens, yet we need our freedom acknowledged and not infringed upon.
If, in childhood, we experienced the fulfillment of the five A’s in a moderately reasonable way—good enough—we are able to seek them ever after from others in moderate doses. When they were not fulfilled we might feel a bottomless pit inside us and we seek too much, more that any other healthy human can, or is willing to, fulfill.
If we notice this excessive craving in ourselves we work on our childhood issues in therapy . We are committed to keeping our needs moderated rather than extreme or demanding. We are committed to expressing our needs and appreciating their fulfillment in a good enough way. We are willing to grieve any non-fulfillment in childhood and move on to self- parenting . Then we can be ready for adult love from our partner.
This adult love can certainly include seeking a “mommy moment” or a “daddy moment” from a partner from time to time. Those are normal needs that can be met with a healthy fulfillment. But if we want parenting all the time we don’t have an adult relationship only a parent-child one. Indeed, we never lose our need for fatherly and motherly love. It can take the form of caring, guiding, supporting. We are not embarrassed to admit this need in ourselves. We are healthy when we seek it in supportive people around us. We are grateful to them when they offer it. We feel capable to offer it to others too.
Our spiritual practice is to say yes unconditionally to the gifts and limitations our parents exhibited. We open to the grace of forgiving . This follows naturally upon our psychological work of grieving the past and letting it go. We let go of ill-will, resentment, blame, and the need to retaliate against our parents or any substitute person on whom we have transferred a father or mother face.
An effulgent spaciousness opens in our hearts. Liberation happens because we let go of what we craved so desperately from others. Now we find it in ourselves and others. We find out how much space is in ourselves and in our life when what was crowding it out has finally been cleared away.
Adapted from Wholeness and Holiness: How to Be Sane, Spiritual, and Saintly (Orbis, 2020)
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
David Richo, Ph.D., is a retired psychotherapist, now an author and workshop leader.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.