I was sitting alone tonight, wondering why I have such a strong desire not to be alone, and really came to the conclusion that we are wired to desire relationships for security purposes.
If you think about it, people are rather greedy by nature, however, many of us have an altruistic side, or perhaps even get pleasure out of giving. If we are all in it for ourselves, how can that be?
Currently, it is my belief that we give to get. And if we don’t get, we won’t give. It’s sad, but I have yet to find anyone who gives and doesn’t get back something in return.
Since we are talking about relationships, I’ll focus on that for now. Specifically, we give to help bond people to us. And why do we want people bonded to us? For security. We want a safety net, in the event that we fail to maintain ourselves (which there is good reason to believe will happen at some point in our life!).
This security bond begins when we are a baby, and our primary caregiver(s) provide us our needs. It then is projected onto other people throughout our lives in our primary relationship. Besides, this primary bond, we create secondary bonds with family and friends, all with the goal of providing a secure environment for ourselves in a quid pro quot relationship.
Of course, this is all very natural, which means that we don’t really think about the impact of the security bond, however, it bears thinking about as we walk through life alone so as to not fool ourselves into feelings of false security.