I’d Love You to Want Me

“Baby, I'd love you to want me
The way that I want you, the way that it should be
Baby, you'd love me to want you
The way that I want to if you'd only let it be.”

Lobo, I’d Love You to Want Me (1972)

I first heard Lobo’s song “I’d Love You to Want Me” back when I was in high school. The lyrics and the tune haunted my heart. All of my young life I had wanted someone to want me, to love me. At the time, I thought more in terms of finding a lover my age, but looking back now, I think there was something much deeper going on inside me.

I think the need this song evoked in me was first and foremost about the love and acceptance that I never received from my parents. I wanted them to love and accept me for being me. I wanted them to want me as their child. But that never happened, or at least I never knew it or felt like they loved and accepted me unconditionally.

It was from this wounded place inside that I then projected outwardly, wanting a lover who could want me and love me “the way that I want you, the way that it should be.” It was a very needy place inside of me at 16 years old and unfortunately the wound got bigger and bigger with each passing year—and I got needier and needier.

The needier I got inside from wanting someone to want me—anyone—the more I came to associate love with caretaking and people-pleasing. As a result, I started the codependent game of focusing on any single person who showed the least bit of empathy for me to the point where I eventually took this person hostage. I put big demands on their time and I smothered them with attention, gifts and a huge overdose of my inner-neediness.

It didn’t take long for abandonment to ensue—time after time after time. As a classic codependent, I licked my wounds after someone ran away from me and then I repeated the same needy pattern of behavior all over again. I didn’t understand that I desperately wanted someone to give me the love and acceptance that my parents had failed to give me—and that I was failing to give to myself.

Recovery has taught me much about the failures of parental love and how those failures cause a lack of self-love in a child. Certainly I’ve learned that my parents loved me, but they just didn’t know how to express it properly. And I’ve learned that I have to re-parent myself and give myself the love that I’ve so desperately wanted. But that doesn’t stop me from hurting inside sometimes still.

There are days when I feel like a five year old motherless, fatherless child. I feel untouchable, unlovable and unworthy to even be alive. I feel hopeless like no one is on my side or ever will be. And I feel like God and every form of love are a million miles away. It’s a desperately worthless feeling. It’s a feeling that devastates my entire being.

But when that feeling hits, I’ve learned to sit and walk with it. I’ve learned to let it be. It has to be processed and released. I’ve also learned to ask Higher Love what this feeling may be trying to teach me and I ask for insight into the wound that is responsible for this deep dark feeling. I’ve never fully gotten that insight, but I have allowed the feeling to dwell within me until it’s ready to leave. I’ve learned not to medicate it away with sugar or shopping.

Hopefully, the more we allow ourselves to face these bad old (but necessary) feelings, the more we will process, let go and be free of them; the more we will learn to love ourselves better and the more we will be ready to find someone who will want and love us in the same newfound healthy way that we want and love them.