The paradox is unavoidable: two people who swear they cannot exist without each other bicker endlessly when together, yet mourn each other's absence when apart. This contradiction isn't a relationship problem—it's a clarity problem. The moment you believe another person is essential to your completeness, you've already poisoned the relationship.
Nature has played an elaborate trick on us. Through hormones and chemical signals, we're convinced that fulfillment lies outside ourselves, in another person. This biological hijacking served evolutionary purposes—ensuring procreation and pair bonding—but it comes at tremendous cost. We mistake chemical dependency for love and build entire lives on the false premise that we need someone else to feel whole.
The Juice Extraction Trap
Here's what actually happens in most relationships: both people enter with an unspoken agenda. They're looking to extract something from their partner—completion, validation, security, or meaning. It's as if they view the other person as a fruit to be squeezed, wringing out every drop of juice to fill the emptiness within themselves.
When both partners are operating from this extraction mindset, the relationship becomes a daily negotiation of who gets squeezed more. Each person is simultaneously the juicer and the squeezed, the extractor and the extracted from. This is not a recipe for love. This is a terrible process that guarantees suffering for both.
The Real Work Begins Within
If you genuinely care about someone, the most loving thing you can do is work on yourself first. Before you even approach another person, before you look at them with expectations, do the internal work required to become someone worth being with.
This means cultivating such richness within yourself—through spiritual practice, self-awareness, genuine contentment—that your presence with another becomes a gift rather than a demand. It means becoming the kind of person others enjoy being around not because you fulfill their emptiness, but because you don't require them to fulfill yours.
Understanding True Fulfillment
The fundamental misconception is that fulfillment is something to seek outside yourself. This life—your existence right now—is already full. You don't need to extract it from somewhere else. The reason you feel empty is not because you're missing something or someone; it's because you haven't realized what you already possess.
When you believe the juice of life exists in another person, you will inevitably try to extract it. When you understand that this juice is already within you, you can be with another person freely, without desperation or manipulation. That's when genuine relationship becomes possible.
Building Relationships on Presence, Not Need
The shift required is profound but simple: approach relationships as an expression of your wholeness, not as a solution to your incompleteness. Instead of asking what someone can give you, ask what you can offer them. Instead of depending on them to complete you, you depend on yourself for that work.
This doesn't diminish the importance of relationships. Rather, it elevates them. A relationship between two whole people—two individuals who have done the work to fulfill themselves—is infinitely richer than a relationship between two incomplete people trying to use each other as instruments of completion.
The paradox resolves itself: when you stop needing someone, the relationship improves. When you stop trying to extract, both people breathe easier. When you show up as a complete person, there's nothing left but genuine connection.
The First Responsibility
Before you touch another person's life with your needs and expectations, do something about your own inner emptiness. This isn't selfish. It's the most generous thing you can do. A whole person in a relationship uplifts it. A desperate person, no matter how much they claim to love, will always leave suffering in their wake.
The question isn't whether attachment is good or bad. The question is whether you've done the work to transform need into presence, extraction into offering, and dependence into genuine care.