"The only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to get.”
- Tony Robbins
Tony Robbins identified the 6 Human Needs; Certainty, Uncertainty, Significance, Connection, Growth & Contribution. I call it The Relationship Creed, as I believe these values are not only vital for ourselves as individuals but also as something to share with your partner.
The Relationship Creed allows us to truly see if we are authentically giving to ourselves and our partner. They are made up of 4 primal (personality) needs and 2 spiritual needs.
The 6 Needs of a Relationship
1. CERTAINTY = SAFETY
What is the number one thing that everyone is looking for in a relationship?
Certainty.
Certainty that you’re going to avoid pain, certainty that you can trust your partner and certainty that you can feel comfortable being vulnerable in your relationship.
Being vulnerable allows for closeness and intimacy.
Having certainty in your relationship means that you’ve developed a bond with your partner that you are 100% certain about. You have no doubts about your love for them and trust that they wouldn’t do anything intentionally to bring you suffering.
2. UNCERTAINTY = SPONTANEOUS
The next human need is uncertainty, spontaneity, and variety. Variety can come in many different forms, learning new skills up, levelling your communication process, trying new things where you’re both students and no one is an expert, spontaneous, gift-giving for no reason at all.
We need certainty to feel safe, but we also need uncertainty to feel captivated by our relationship, excitement of the unknown.
3. SIGNIFICANCE
Significantly significant is my top tip.
Sharing your inner most vulnerability with this person and feeling safe doing this.
Why is it that you tell your partner things you don’t tell anyone else? Why do you rely on this one person to make you feel romantically fulfilled?
This comes from feeling significant within the relationship. It can be amazing how many things that can stop us feeling important to our partner like family commitments, activities like golf, football and even pets.
Feeling significant has a vital part of feeling connected.
One of the most crucial relationship needs is feeling significant. You want someone who makes you feel special and important. You can fulfil this for yourself in many ways, but you also need to feel significant in the eyes of your partner. This process works both ways
4. CONNECTION AND LOVE
The fourth thing a relationship needs is connection and love. You’ve already established that you want to feel significant in the eyes of your partner, but you also need to form a deep connection and develop an intense love.
Connection can happen instantaneously in relationships – you meet someone and have great conversations and share interests or are immediately attracted to each other. This state of being is limerence and is short lived (Loved up stage - Harville Hendricks).
Love takes more time to form, but it’s what sustains a strong relationship long after that initial spark of attraction.
Emotional attachment is the key for a long lasting relationship.
5. GROWTH
The first four relationship needs are essential for your survival and the next two are fundamental for your spirit.
If you’re not growing, you’re dying – that’s why growth is addictive. As long as you’re growing you can feel fulfilled with yourself and confident in your relationship with your partner. The need to grow, ties directly to the following need. That’s because we want to grow so we have something to give, or contribute. Self awareness and authenticity are key to growth, contributing to curiousness and hungry for learning about yourself others and the world. Fulfilling your own personal goals, dreams and aspirations. Not feeling the compromise you feel you made. Hold on to the dreams and work together to fulfil both for each other.
6. CONTRIBUTION
As Tony Robbins has said before the secret of living is giving,
“When something good happens to you, what’s the first thing you want to do? Tell someone you love.”
Life is about creating meaning, and a huge part of that is contributing to the world around us. This also applies directly to your relationships:
What are you contributing?
What are you bringing to table?
How are you providing for your partner mentally, emotionally, physically and financially?
How are they contributing to your well-being and happiness?
Being in a partnership is about having an emotional connection whilst holding yourself accountable as an ‘I’ being emotional attached while staying autonomous.
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Love is an action, the ability to know what is needed for yourself and then fulfilling your partner’s relationship needs by communicating and negotiation.
All human beings are constantly seeking to meet the six human needs, and we all tend to value two more than the rest. If we have a conflict within those needs, we will notice the differences between us. They will become more apparent so understanding the relationship needs gives us a really good idea of what each other wants instead of what’s been given.
Love is not a trade off, your love template from your family of origin might have had a condition for love and to get love as child we would have filled that void.
Put your partner first by fulfilling these 6 basic needs in a relationship, when these are reciprocated, when your partner does the same, that’s when the magic happens.
Lottie x