Last updated July 31, 2026 — Added content.
Is your partner not fulfilling your needs? Discover what’s lacking and learn to stop choosing unsuitable partners.
We may still live, love, and laugh, but both partners may feel a sense of emptiness. And we may be so uneasy about it that we fail to communicate our needs. Especially if what’s missing is a strong need that we may be ignoring.
As a result, when something is missing in a relationship, we tend to hold off on making a permanent commitment. So, let’s begin by getting in touch with your needs.
Some people think we are commitment-phobic. In reality, we have no problem building long-term relationships. But they go nowhere. Something important is missing.
What’s missing may be some strong need of ours that we don’t realize we have. It’s important to know what this strong need is, or else we may remain stuck.
We need to accept not having it or recognize that we can’t live without it. Then stop wasting time with an unsuitable partner, especially if it’s not contributing to the life we want.
If you are generally happy with things, but just have that feeling that something is missing, the first thing to do is understand why that feeling is there. It may be something you need to change.
If we don’t recognize when we are with someone who is not right for us, then we stay anyway for any of several reasons: For sex, for companionship, a travel partner, whatever. In this case, we are not allowing ourselves to become available for the right person.
Looking back on my experiences, I’ve noticed that I have had relationships where we just never discussed and shared our dreams. We enjoyed being together, but we didn’t work at creating growth towards a common goal — the goal of marriage.
Why I kept finding women who were so patient, I do not know. I must have been subconsciously selecting women who were so patient that they just went along with being in a relationship without needing to discuss its future.
We were fooling ourselves. We were in a relationship, but we didn’t examine any plans for the future. There was physical intimacy but no emotional intimacy.
Learning what the collective needs are and what we both want from the relationship is essential. Sharing this knowledge only works when we have open communication and emotional availability.
Otherwise, there may be a lack of commitment. Or worse, both partners may want something different out of life, but they are comfortable with the status quo of the existing relationship. Can a thing like that last?
Do you have a strong need for something so vital that you can’t imagine living without it, but you can’t quite figure out what it is?
That might be what’s in the way. But to have a better relationship, you have to know what it is. You might keep searching for a perfect partner in vain if you don’t know what your absolute necessity is.
You’ll never know what’s preventing your success with a healthy relationship if you don’t focus on this need. You’ll end up going from partner to partner without fully involving yourself in any relationship. Does this sound like the pattern of your life?
If you find someone with whom you share the same understanding, someone you appreciate, and you trust one another, then you’ll find it easier to get involved emotionally, and you’ll know it. Better yet, you’ll feel it.
Use that trust and understanding to discuss the issues you might be having. Open and honest communication will help you both work on a compromise and find solutions to relationship problems.
At least it may help you both recognize the limits of the relationship. Accept it or avoid throwing away years with an incompatible partner.
Failure to communicate can lead to misunderstandings. Talking about it can help clear up the confusion.
If you’ve gotten comfortable with the status quo of your relationship and are happy with it, there’s nothing wrong with that. Happiness is a good thing.
However, if it stands in the way of something significant you know you want, and you feel something is still missing, then you need to examine your needs. What exactly is missing? Is it a specific type of relationship that you haven't pursued? Or perhaps you are looking for a partner who truly aligns with your dreams.
Many feelings can get in the way of moving forward. For instance, you might fear that things won't turn out as you hope, which can lead to the tendency to choose the wrong partner repeatedly.
You might feel something is always missing because you keep choosing partners who are not your type in one way or another. Repeating the same mistake with selecting inappropriate partners can often be traced to unresolved issues.
For example, we may have had problematic experiences with prior relationships, and we are trying to reconstruct the same situation repeatedly in an effort to understand its cause.
It’s possible that we feel comfortable with a particular arrangement and have the need to create it over and over. And we do this even if it doesn’t lead to a constructive future.1
That could result from failing to think things through and to recognize our specific needs. If we don’t consider our values, we could very well get stuck in a pattern of repeated mistakes in our relationships.
We tend to get involved with the same type of partner that doesn’t offer a rewarding future but somehow resembles another person who negatively affected us.
We might have forgotten it on a conscious level, but it’s still causing us to choose an inappropriate partner and fail to commit to an ongoing relationship.
We seek these types of partners to resolve the problem that is still affecting us emotionally. And if we haven’t alleviated the issues that troubled us in the past, we might go through life trying to fix the conflict in our minds that resulted from the unsettling experience.
As I mentioned, we have a subconscious need to repeat similar experiences to attempt to change them. So we seek relationships with similar partners.
Unfortunately, selecting people who resemble a prior partner who caused emotional stress will only repeat the pattern. As a result, they fail to consider anything other than their own needs.2
Have you grown up with parents who thought more about their own concerns and didn’t consider their impact on you? Or you had a relationship with a partner who functioned that way.
That’s a toxic experience, and later in life, you subconsciously feel a need to fix that. So you seek partners that behave similarly, hoping to learn what’s behind it in an effort to understand your unresolved issues.
A negative occurrence in childhood with a parent, or troublesome encounters with early dating, can leave a memory of something we need to resolve. So we try to replicate the experience with our new partner to correct the feeling that left us with a lack of a positive conclusion.
These early life mishaps can be many other things, such as something that went wrong in our school days. For example, a teacher or student who blamed you for something you didn’t do.
Some people never recover from the negative things that happened in their past. Nevertheless, those experiences set the stage for where we are now and how we behave.
These experiences might have traumatized us in the past, and if we didn’t process the issue in our minds to put it away and not let it affect us anymore, we could continue trying to resolve it throughout our lives.
Our brain protects us by preventing us from seeing the connection between early-life events and our current functioning. As a result, our lives are affected by forgotten memories of troubling experiences.
It can help to examine early relationships that troubled us. That might provide the information we need to understand how they affect our present behavior.3
Think through the history of your life, from the moment of any adverse occurrences. First, notice the theme that developed. Then observe how the initial experience still strongly influences you today.
What complicates things is that there may be multiple events that don’t seem to be connected. But they build on themselves to add to your “life story.”
Thinking about the pattern that emerged may help you better understand where your life is headed with the way you select your partners.
Now that you know what’s been affecting you and causing you to pick the wrong partners that cause you to feel something is missing, you’ll be on a path to changing the narrative of your life story.
You need to know when you are wasting time in an unacceptable relationship. And you need to have the determination to end it or fix it.
Focus on finding a partner who is trustworthy and whom you appreciate for their values so you can develop a committed relationship.4
You’ll know it’s right when you accept the other person as they are, despite fears and uncertainties. When you realize you’re in an incredible relationship, you need to maintain the concept that this is the one. And that you want the relationship forever.
Life is short, and we all have dreams to fulfill. If you don’t focus on what you truly want in life and the kind of person you want to spend it with, you may someday realize that you wasted the precious years you could have had together.
Remember to avoid the need to resolve problematic issues that have haunted you all your life. You can do it. You’re in control of your life. Create a new life story.
Was this article helpful?
