Louis Wise on feeling needy

Von Furstenberg’s advice feels dated, sure, but in more ways than one. I feel like neediness is having a moment. Nowhere is this more obvious than in ‘Needy’, a song from Ariana Grande’s latest album in which she delivers a defiant defence of needing more. ‘Sorry if I’m up and down a lot,’ she sings, ‘sorry that I think I’m not enough’ — but she doesn’t sound sorry at all. Instead, it’s part and parcel of today’s emotional landscape, where you let it all hang out and you never apologise.

Neediness is the more obvious, neurotic cousin of Vulnerability, where, in modern therapy-speak, you listen to your feelings, share them and shout that each and every one of them is valid. It suggests that in this age of exhausting over-self-curation, there are cracks, and they can be cute, too. Especially if they come in a high ponytail and are warbled over a slightly watered down trap beat.

This ethos trickles down all the way from Silicon Valley-speak to — yes, sigh, sorry — the just-departed Love Island. But the latter showed its limits, too. As soon as the women got needy, they got dumped, whereas when the men felt needy — mainly the ‘need’ to crack on to someone else — they got to do the dumping. And horrid as it is, I can’t point the finger. I don’t find neediness attractive either, in myself or in others. In dating, whenever those messages pile up — ‘Where are you?’; ‘I miss you’; ‘I’m bored!’ — I freeze. And I feel bad for it, I really do. I’m aware that in order to have a successful relationship, you have to be open to vulnerability, and therefore, possibly, to neediness, too.