Emotional Needs

So, according to Willard F. Harley (this marriage counsellor guy), every person has something that Harley calls a "love bank". When you make "deposits" in someone's love bank (like complimenting them, hugging them, giving them cookies, whatever), they love you more. You can also make withdrawals (yelling, ignoring them) and then they love you less.

Then the idea is that there are ten major emotional needs, and that people typically have around five that make the highest "deposits" into their love banks. Here's the list:


They're all what they sound like, but here is the page you can visit for more details. (Note: Site assumes all couples are cishet, and there's some sexism.) Basically, for each need, if you feel bad when a certain person doesn't fulfill it, then that's one of your emotional needs. For instance, if one of your emotional needs is affection, then you might be sad that your partner doesn't hug you enough, or that they never give you flowers. Or if one of your needs is conversation, you might get really frustrated with people who don't talk much, or when someone doesn't seem to be listening to you. You could also tell by how you act. Like if you get really excited to watch your favourite tv show with someone you care about, one of your emotional needs is probably recreational companionship.

These can apply to friends, too, of course. I think the idea is that someone who fulfills a couple of your needs could be a good friend to you, and then life partners are supposed to fulfill all your needs. Also if someone is particularly good at fulfilling some of your emotional needs, you might get a crush on them or fall in love with them (if they make enough deposits in your love bank). Or you might fall out of love with someone who isn't doing this.

My highest one is (totally shockingly) conversation, which is why I talk so much. Would you add anything else to the list, or remove something? Do you think liking people actually works like this?

I think it's an interesting way to think about relationships, so maybe some other people will like this concept.

I don't really like the description of love as like a balance in a bank account - to me it seems uncomfortably close to the idea that if you do X and Y for somebody they owe you love for it.

But the general idea that different people have different emotional needs and they tend to be attracted (romantically or platonically) to people who fulfill those needs for them somehow seems sound. Personally, my primary emotional needs off that list would definitely be Recreational Companionship, Honesty and Openness, Affection and Conversation, and they describe pretty well what I want to get out of my relationships (Shadey provides all of them and it is wonderful).

By this logic, life is a Harvest Moon game and we all live in it. This also manages to forget other types of relationships; such as friendship, familial relations, relations between people passing each other on the street, etc. By this logic, you could end up with several possible spouses that you're equal in love with ranging from the person three blocks down to one of or both of your parents(so long as they meet all of your "love bank" requirements and have enough... er... money[?] stored up).

This "love bank" also manage to categorize the emotional needs of people into ten boxes, while not going about to define those boxes. For example, by conversation, is it meant that scintillating debate on the topic of emotional needs is most often required, or that mere small talk is simple enough?

I think that there was some sort of good intention behind this, but it just doesn't go anywhere well simply because it narrows down the complexity of human emotional needs to ten shiny boxes.