There’s this moment that happens when you’re sitting across from someone you love, throat tight, heart pounding, trying to ask for what you actually want. Not what you should want. Not what you’ve convinced yourself you need. But what you want.

And you choke.

You default to “I need you to…” instead of “I want…”

That tiny word change betrays everything about how we’ve learned to move through the world. Needs come with the weight of requirement. Of obligation. Of no real choice.

Wants? They expose us. They make us vulnerable. They admit desire without demand.

I’ve watched countless clients slip into this pattern across every domain of their lives. Relationships where they frame every desire as a need, then wonder why intimacy feels like a transaction. Careers where they “need” certain achievements, then feel hollow when they arrive. Health routines built on punishment rather than pleasure.

The pattern is everywhere once you start looking.

When you tell your partner you need them to text you more, you’ve created a chore list item. When you tell them you want more connection throughout the day and ask what they want – you’ve opened a conversation about mutual desire.

One path leads to compliance. The other to actual intimacy.

Here’s something to think consider. Most of our “needs” are elaborate performances. We say “I need” when we really mean “I want to be seen as someone who needs this.” We’ve been taught that raw wanting is selfish, but needs? Needs are legitimate. Respectable. So we dress our desires in the costume of necessity and parade them around, hoping no one sees the seams splitting. We perform these needs for others, for ourselves. We need the promotion to feel valid. We need the relationship milestone to prove our worth. We need the social recognition to justify our existence. And in this desperate theater of needing, we suffocate the voice that might have simply said: “This is what I want. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just me, wanting.” The performance exhausts everybody. Most of all, ourselves.

One of the most uncomfortable truths I’ve faced in my own life: so many of my “needs” were actually shields protecting me from the vulnerability of admitting what I wanted.

Needs feel justified. Wants feel exposing.

Needs come with the implication that something terrible happens if they’re not met. Wants acknowledge that we might survive without them – but question whether that survival constitutes actual living.

The spaces between wanting and needing are where we actually find ourselves.

This isn’t just about who we love. It’s about how we work. How we move. How we create. How we exist.

When you frame your career as a series of needs – need the promotion, need the title, need the validation – you trap yourself in a maze with no exit. Because each fulfilled need spawns another. The hunger never stops.

Ask yourself: what do I actually want from my work? Not what I’ve been told to need. Not what looks good. What feeds something real inside me?

These questions hurt. They’re supposed to.

Listen to your body when you say “I need” versus “I want.”

Need tightens your shoulders. Clenches your jaw. Creates the subtle armor of demand.

Want softens you. Opens you. Makes space for possibility rather than requirement.

Your physical response never lies. It’s been keeping score all along.

This shift – from need-based to want-based living – isn’t some abstract philosophy. It’s a daily practice of brutal honesty.

Start small. In conversations today, catch yourself before “need” escapes your lips. Replace it with “want” and notice what happens. Notice the resistance. The fear that without the weight of “need” behind it, your desire might be dismissible.

That fear is everything. Sit with it. It’s showing you exactly where you’ve abandoned yourself.

There’s this myth that needs are stronger than wants. That framing something as a need gives it power.

The opposite is true.

Needs create prisoners. Wants create partners.

Needs create employees. Wants create collaborators.

Needs create obligation. Wants create possibility.

The most profound transformation happens when you have the courage to say: “This is what I want. Not what I need to survive. What I want to thrive. And I’m asking – not demanding – if you want that too.”

That’s where the real conversation begins. That’s where connection lives.

That’s where you find yourself, waiting, in the raw confession of your actual desires.