Love Was Never Meant to Be Held by One Person: Rethinking relationships, emotional needs, and connection

The pressure I keep hearing About in the therapy room

Many of the people I work with are carrying a lot of hope and expectation in one relationship, or searching for the person who will finally meet all their emotional needs.

They want a partner who is best friend, confidant, co-parent, companion, and emotional home base all at once. Even tools like attachment theory, which can be helpful for self-understanding, sometimes get stretched into the belief that the right partner will finally heal old wounds.

If they’re partnered, the relationship can feel heavy with expectation and threaded with disappointment when one person can’t do it all. If they’re single, there’s a different kind of weight. A sense that life hasn’t properly started yet, that something essential is missing, that happiness is waiting on someone else’s arrival.

Different circumstances, same underlying idea. Somewhere out there is one person who is supposed to hold everything. But if we slow down and really look at that expectation, it’s worth asking whether it’s more than any one relationship could reasonably carry.

How Romantic Love Became The “Main” Relationship

This story is everywhere.

It lives in the movies many of us grew up with, in novels, in the wedding industry, and in the quiet way adulthood is defined as coupling up. Romantic partnership is treated as the main relationship, while friendships, community, and chosen family get pushed to the sidelines. Nice to have, maybe but not essential.

We’re also taught a very narrow version of what love is supposed to look like: two people, exclusive, forever, each other’s everything. This model is presented not as one option among many, but as the goal we’re all meant to reach.We rarely question the shape of this structure. Instead, we try to make ourselves fit inside it.

Why One Person Can’t Meet All Our Emotional Needs

No single person can be our lover, co-regulator, intellectual equal, adventure companion, emotional witness, and constant source of comfort. That isn’t just a partnership. It’s an entire ecosystem.

When we expect one person to meet every need for intimacy and belonging, something predictable happens. We feel lonely in relationships. We feel perpetually not quite met. We question ourselves for wanting more, or we quietly resent our partner for being human. It’s not that anyone is failing. It’s that the job description was never realistic to begin with.

Imagining connection differently

From a nervous system perspective, it simply asks too much of two people. We’re wired for connection with many others, not total reliance on one. What if support came from a network, not just a partner? The older I get, the more I question the premise underneath all of this. Not “How do I find the right person?” but “Why have we decided one person is supposed to hold everything in the first place?”

Most people discover that support doesn’t come from one person alone, but from a network. Friends, community, chosen family, and shared spaces of belonging. Many small threads of care that, together, hold more than any single relationship could. Connection has almost always been shared.

What an Aspen Grove Can Teach us About Relationships and Belonging

Aspen trees are one of my favorite reminders of this. If you’ve ever walked through an aspen grove in the mountains, you might notice how each white trunk looks separate and self-contained. But underground, they’re connected by one shared root system. What looks like many individual trees is actually one living organism quietly exchanging nutrients and support beneath the surface.

No single tree carries the whole system.

The natural world offers a gentler model of belonging. Maybe we’re not meant to funnel all our needs into one relationship. Maybe we’re meant to belong to many. Maybe partnership is one trunk within a wider network of care, strong not because it stands alone, but because it’s connected to something larger.

When love is distributed this way, there’s less pressure and less intensity. There’s more room to breathe. Romantic partnership can still be intimate and meaningful, but it doesn’t have to be everything.

Our lifelong need for love and connection was never meant to be held by one person. It was meant to be supported by a wider web of relationships, community, and the many places we find meaning and belonging.