While you are sweating away doing a hard day’s work in the office, well, some days i’m not. Peter (Master Jedi) & I can be found discussing love, life and the nature of humanity, all in the name of coming to a greater understanding of ourselves and enhance my executive performance. Today we sat on a Surrey hilltop, looking over a beautiful landscape.

Its often the case that i have a lot of realisations and revelations through the conversations i have with people, which is why i talk and write so much. Communicating and exploring issues together is the perfect way to gain new perspectives, re-clarify ideas and allow your own thoughts to rise to the top of the metaphorical cereal packet.

It started when Peter asked me, rhetorically, why it would be the case that physical intimacy is so important to some people, and not so much to others. My experimental answer was that touch and being tactile is a powerful expression of love and affection, that shows someone they are loved and allows you to love them. Perhaps the need to be physically shown affection tends to come from not having had enough of it from your caregivers in our younger, formative years. We learn about love and how it is expressed through our parents, and one of their primary ways of expressing their love is through touch.

And then i began to understand. Its wider and broader than that. There are the core human needs we all have, but then there are personal individual needs each of us have that are different. Most of those individualised adult needs are determined by what we were exposed to in our childhood. It seems to obvious, but its also such a mystery. What we seek out in adulthood is what we didn’t have enough of when we were small. We avoid what we suffered or had too much of. Most people are walking around trying to find and/or seek out resolution for needs that weren’t met when they were a child.

That doesn’t mean you want to breastfeed every time you see a matriarchial figure, clearly.

If you lacked love or any tactile expression of it, you need it more than the average person does in your relationship. If you were smothered, you will need a long leash from the other person to be yourself and the security to go wandering. If you didn’t have any privacy, you will be secretive and over-value your personal privacy. If you were bullied or rejected, you will need an over-sized and unending supply of acceptance and understanding. If the way your parents acted towards you was dramatic, you will need the person you love to show you they care in a very dramatic way. You can start to see it in everyone you meet. When you ask yourself what they are needing, you can deduce what happened when they were young.

The key word is “need”. Not what you want, but what you need. Need is something you have very little control over, and something that drives you. Hunger is a need, as is shelter. Emotionally speaking, a need is something you crave and desire that brings relief or completion. The tricky bit is how to resolve the need itself. Does it go when its been met? Unlikely, as its a temporary relief. Does it go when its met enough times or for long enough? Probably not, as the need itself is too destructive in your life and there’s no logical reason why it should dissipate instead of recur like hunger does.

People with similar needs and backgrounds seek each other out and recognise each other intuitively. When they combine in the same space, the result is highly explosive and a ravenous feasting for each to get what they need, emotionally and spiritually. Often what is msitakenly called “love” is actually that feeding frenzy, and the powerful and intense experiences that result stay with us forever. Lust in itself is a violent need for physical intimacy. When you meet the first person who can fill the black hole completely, you attach heavily and its incredibly hard to let go. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re searching, what you’ve found, or why it hurts as much as it does when its not there anymore.

Its amazing what the fresh air and cloudy sunset can teach you.