By Margot Carmichael Lester

We all want to be in fun and healthy relationships, so we strive to find partners to share our lives with. Yet some of us try too hard, creating an environment that actually keeps us from getting what we want. Why? Wanting is attractive, needing is not.

Phil Holcomb, a Seattle-based personal coach and owner of Extraordinary Learning says the means to a successful end lies in overcoming your attachments to results without giving up on your goals and dreams.

The difference between wanting and needing often comes up when we try too hard. We all need to put in effort to get what we want, but trying too hard makes us appear needy. We try too hard, Holcomb says, because we’re unwilling “to do the work necessary to ‘fill our own cup’ and operate under the illusion (false belief) that if we just find the right partner we will be okay with ourselves. That’s taking the victim position that Mr./Ms. Right will ‘make’ me feel happy, full, content, satisfied.”[$MSN.ARTICLE.CTALINKS$]The problem with that is twofold:

1. If your relationship with yourself is incomplete, you’ll tend to attract people with same incompleteness. “Ugh. The person I really want is someone who is living a full, relatively satisfying life and has a strong, healthy relationship with herself/himself,” Holcomb says. “That person is not looking for me or other people who are ‘running on empty.’”

2. Focusing on finding what you need in another person perpetuates the myth that how you feel about yourself and your life is about something “out there.” And because of that orientation, you spend resources