need and want

“to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? and here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. for to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. so whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

marilynne robinson, housekeeping

 i don't consider myself a super needy person. i've always been fine with eating lunch alone or going to the movies by myself or just hanging out at home on a friday night. maybe this is partly a result of circumstance, but it's never bothered me all that much. i'm mostly okay on my own. but sometimes, i just want to be needed, you know?
 

“having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. ”

margaret mead

this isn't meant to invite pity; i've just been thinking about the ideas of need and want lately. i feel like showing someone you need and/or want them in your life is part of being a good friend or potentially more than a friend. if that need is eventually fulfilled, does that mean that the relationship is over? it seems to me that if you don't need or want (i think of these two terms as kind of interchangeable, but i'm still trying to decide if they are significantly different.) a person anymore, something either needs to change or to end. 

i struggle with this, because it usually seems to me that time and experience and subsequent investment in a friendship (or whatever) would just create need/want that has some kind of enduring power. but i guess that's not the case? and i'm all about moving with the cheese, so it's something i need to just deal with. but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt when you realize you are not needed or wanted anymore.

eponine deals with this same feeling: "without me, his world will go on turning."

i feel you, eponine.