“Love isn’t about finding the person you can live with, it’s finding someone you can’t live without.” ~ Unknown

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I need a man.

Not because of what I’m not—but for all that I am.

I need someone who shows up, someone who wants to stay.

I need someone to look at me, and know that I can be a huge pain in the ass—but they still choose me to be the pain in their ass, and not someone else’s.

I don’t need anyone to provide for me financially or to buy me a white diamond to prove they love me—and honestly, I don’t need them to promise they’ll love me forever, because we can’t predict the future.

Instead, they could (more honestly) say this: I promise to let you warm your cold feet against my legs, when we first get into bed during the dead of winter, and I promise I will always be there to open the pickle jar for you.

See, the thing is—my pickle jar has secretly launched a campaign against me and my independence. It won’t be opened, no matter how hard I’ve tried—or thought: maybe I can just wait it out, and try again—it simply refuses to be opened.

It’s currently sitting, waiting for someone else to open it—and for a while, I despised it, because that pickle jar represented everything I had spent years try to disprove.

Here is the deal with being single and the whole messy side-business of whether we actually can (or should) need someone or not…

I am ambitious, self-sufficient, creative and probably more than a handful of a dozen other adjectives all meaning the same thing—that I am okay without a man.

But this is the reality: just because I am okay without someone, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be better with the (right) partner. I’ve thought a lot about this, and if there isn’t anything about another person I need—then why would I need them in my life?

What a man can give me won’t be found in his wallet or on a shelf in a department store, but rather in the small everyday actions that demonstrate his feelings for me.

The man that I will someday grow to need is also the one who can bring something to my life that’s different from what is already there. I need a man to sometimes stand up to me, not to kiss my ass with eternal sweetness. I don’t need someone who quotes poetry to me on a daily basis, but someone who loves that I write it for him on occasion.

I don’t need someone to be like me—but rather someone who lets me just be.

I’ve learned the difference in being around someone who I need to shrink myself down for, versus letting myself expand into whatever form feels right for me on that particular day.

So yes, I do need to be loved—but I also need someone who will keep my feet warm during the winter.

Maybe he would even bring me my favorite thick pair of wool socks—and while we sat in front of a fire, he would put them on me and let them stay on long after all my other clothes had come off, while he was making love to me and touching me in only the places that he could.

I don’t want just another warm body though, and truth be told, he’ll have to be pretty amazing to even get in the door.  I don’t have the stomach for the artificial or the shallow. Instead, show me a man who second guesses his heart because of logic, and wears his passion like a well-earned badge of honor.

Maybe I don’t need to be saved, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need help.

Because regardless of anything else right now, that pickle jar is still sitting there…mocking me.

I need someone around who can do all of those things I struggle with, like opening the pickle jar, changing the really high light bulbs without getting shocked or scratched in the process, fixing things with something other than duct tape, and remembering that yes, its Friday, so it’s time to set out the garbage.

I can’t do everything, and I also don’t want to.

I want to have that complementary relationship someday, where we each have our own strengths, and we help to bring out the best in each other. I don’t want to constantly be fighting him for control of household activities or of the relationship, because we’ll both know that we’ll have to take turns.

On occasion, he may be stronger than me; and on others, he might need his queen to step up for a bit—and when that happens, I’ll be there.

Because while he may keep my feet warm and even open the pickle jar—there will also be things that I can bring to his life to enrich it.

Maybe it will be in the way that I take care of him while he is sick, or the way I rub his shoulders or feet down with oil after a long day. It might even be as simple as wrapping my arms around him each night and kissing him like the very first time.

But whatever it is—we both will be better because of having the other in our life.

So for right now, my pickle jar can wait. I’m done struggleing and banging on it in order to get it to open. At this moment, it’s just going to sit in its place and wait for someone to come along who can do what I can’t.

Because chances are, that same man is in need of something only I have.

And when we come together, we just may find that we really can have it all.

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Author: Kate Rose

Image: Flickr/Charli White; author’s own

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina