When Your Deepest Desires Require Someone Else

Because not everything can be achieved by effort alone.

Photo by Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash

There are some dreams you can build alone.

You can hustle your way into a promotion.
You can rewrite your CV. Start the business. Move cities. Get a degree.
You can go to therapy. Save money. Grow emotionally. You can glow up. Boss up. Man up. Show up.

But some of the deepest, truest desires of the heart?

They require someone else.

Not just cheering from the sidelines.
Not just “sending love and light.”
But choosing you back.

You can be ready for marriage and still need someone else to also be ready.
You can long to raise children and still need a body, a partner, a yes, a miracle.
You can want reconciliation but still need the other person to pick up the phone.

These are the desires that make you human and helpless at the same time.

And in a world that worships independence, that tells you you can manifest anything, journal it into existence, meditate it into reality, that helplessness feels offensive. Out of sync. Weak.

But it’s not weakness. It’s truth.

The architecture of desire is often relational.
We were never designed to be entirely self-sufficient.
Some things must be chosen, built, or created together, or not at all.

And that reality is humbling.

Because no matter how healed you are, no matter how emotionally literate, no matter how many podcasts you’ve listened to on attachment styles and boundaries and generational trauma…
You cannot date yourself.
You cannot co-parent alone.
You cannot download intimacy or manufacture mutuality.

You can prepare for love.
But you cannot force it to arrive.

And that doesn’t make you powerless, it makes you human.
It invites patience. Surrender. And a kind of hope that isn’t frantic or demanding, but rooted.

It’s okay to admit that you need others for the dreams that matter most.
Not in a desperate way, but in an honest one.

Because some things, the truest things, can’t be earned.
They can only be received.