"It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them"
About this Quote
Storr’s line cuts against the romance-industrial script that treats need as proof of depth. He’s not talking about the warm, ordinary desire to be close; he’s targeting compulsion, the kind that turns another person into medication. The key move is the word “only”: a hard boundary that reframes intimacy as something earned through self-sufficiency rather than intensified dependence. It’s an unsentimental claim, and that’s why it lands. It denies the reader an easy alibi - “I’m needy because I love you” - and asks a more uncomfortable question: am I relating to you, or managing my anxiety through you?
The subtext is clinical without sounding cold. Storr, writing in a late-20th-century Britain steeped in psychoanalytic thinking and postwar skepticism about mass conformity, consistently argued for the value of solitude and an inner life. In that context, “real relationship” means one between two separate people, not a fused unit where one person props up the other’s fragile sense of self. Compulsive need flattens the partner into a function: validator, rescuer, stabilizer, audience. It’s a demand dressed as devotion.
What makes the sentence effective is its moral reversal. Dependency is usually sold as romantic intensity; Storr treats it as a subtle form of control. When you don’t need someone to survive your own moods, you can finally see them clearly enough to choose them. That choice - voluntary, revocable, adult - is his definition of the real thing.
The subtext is clinical without sounding cold. Storr, writing in a late-20th-century Britain steeped in psychoanalytic thinking and postwar skepticism about mass conformity, consistently argued for the value of solitude and an inner life. In that context, “real relationship” means one between two separate people, not a fused unit where one person props up the other’s fragile sense of self. Compulsive need flattens the partner into a function: validator, rescuer, stabilizer, audience. It’s a demand dressed as devotion.
What makes the sentence effective is its moral reversal. Dependency is usually sold as romantic intensity; Storr treats it as a subtle form of control. When you don’t need someone to survive your own moods, you can finally see them clearly enough to choose them. That choice - voluntary, revocable, adult - is his definition of the real thing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Source | Solitude: A Return to the Self — Anthony Storr, 1988 (commonly cited source for this quotation). |
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