Learn These 8 Great Tips On How To Stop Being Needy

Pick up these pieces of advice on how to stop being needy in life

By Madiha A.
Learn These 8 Great Tips On How To Stop Being Needy

How to stop being a needy and desperate girlfriend

Do you feel like checking his whereabouts every 5 minutes or obsessively think about what he would be doing or stalk him on social media? If your answer is yes to these questions, you are definitely a clingy or in simpler words a needy and desperate girlfriend. 
The proverb “slow and steady wins the race” applies to relationships as well. When you try to be too close, too available, too demanding and too much of everything, you start suffocating your partner and this can lead to breaking you apart.

Here are a few tips on how to stop being a needy and desperate girlfriend.

1. Maintain a Distance

No matter how much you love being with him or are possessive about him or obsessively think about him, maintain a distance. I know it can be difficult at first but once you understand that you both need space to grow, it will become easier. 

Neediness sometimes is a result of a lack of confidence in your own self. When you rely solely on what others think about you, you become a people pleaser to get their attention and love. Once you get in the loop of getting satisfaction from love and praise, you become greedy for that attention. This whole situation forces you to become clingy and needy. 

You need to train yourself to believe in yourself and maintain a reasonable distance from your boyfriend so you can both grow side by side as individuals as a healthy and happy couple.

2. Involve Yourself in Things You Love

You had a life before meeting your boyfriend right? You must be having certain hobbies or things that you loved to do. If you think you are becoming too attached or too clingy in your relationship, step back and look around, you will find quite interesting things to get busy with. In fact, it was your personality and individuality that brought you closer, don’t lose that for anything. 

Getting involved in things you love other than your boyfriend will help maintain a much-required distance in your relationship. This distance will help you get over with the clinginess and needfulness. The thoughts of calling or texting him, staying with him all the time, stalking or over accommodating him will subside with time.

Get a life of your own; learn something new, join a cause, volunteer, go out with friends and see how drastically it improves your relationship that was suffocating to death. 

3. Learn to Trust & Be Secure in Yourself

Love can make you do crazy things and so do insecurity and fear. Most relationships are built on trust and if you trust your partner, you will feel insecure, neither for him nor for yourself. Insecurity can lead to jealousy, stalking, overthinking and clingy; desperate in short. 

Learning to trust your partner is the first step towards a better relationship. I won’t tell you to blindly trust your partner. Keeping one eye open would be smart. Being secure in your self will help you overcome your fears and insecurities. When you have faith in yourself, your abilities and love for your partner; you will not go crazy over petty matters. You will stop over-analyzing the situations and digging into the life of your partner. You will not require words of appreciation and constant reassurances.       

How to stop being a Needy and Desperate Boyfriend  

Neediness can be defined in several different ways when it comes to relationships. Men and women can be equally demanding and over accommodating. If the required balance is disturbed, there are more chances of relationship taking a wrong turn. 

If being a boyfriend you find yourself texting more often than required, or are overly impressed by your girlfriend or are poking your nose in her affairs, you need to STOP. This is how you start being needy and desperate and you definitely need to re-think your actions. Here are a few tips to stop being a needy and desperate boyfriend.

4. Step Back & Relax

If you are looking too closely at something, the image may become distorted. For a clearer picture, you need to step back and look at it from a distance. The same goes for the relationship. If you are too close and too clingy, you are looking at minor things and missing the bigger picture. You may need some time to learn this art of stepping back but when you do, you will start enjoying life. You will stop worrying about tiny things that bother you and will start looking at a bigger and clearer scenario. Things that look bigger will start looking small and unimportant. 

While it may be a good quality for some women, most find needy and desperate men unattractive. 

5. Understand Your Kind of Neediness

To solve every problem you need to understand that it is a problem and it needs a working solution. Being needy and clingy isn’t an attractive feature of your personality unless a girl has a certain liking for this kind of trait. 

If you understand that you are getting too clingy and your girl isn’t ok with it, you need a solution to this problem. Neediness can be of two types: approval seeking and attention seeking. Where approval seeking neediness involves giving power to others by believing that every other person is better than you, attention seeking neediness is pathological desire to get attention. Control is in your hand, you just don’t know it yet. As soon as you realize that the problem is with you and has a solution, you will try to make necessary amendments. Once the focus shifts from your own needs to the needs of your partner, life will become worth living.

6. Get Back with the Gang

You definitely had a life before getting into this relationship. Seeing her, falling in love with her and getting a chance to spend time with her must have been overwhelming but losing your individuality, interests, hobbies, and friends isn’t something you experience in most relationships. Your over-involvement, frequent texting, and stalking have labeled you as a clingy boyfriend and you need to tear that label off of your back. 

You need to start somewhere and why not start it with getting back with your old gang. Call your friends and make a plan to do something you loved to do. Go hiking, trekking, fishing or whatever you loved to do. Plan a game or movie night with friends and make a routine of alone time. At first, she might find it weird but once she understands that it is going to benefit both of you she will also be able to plan and enjoy her alone time with her friends.

Learn how to stop being that needy one in a friendship

Relationships should be handled with care. Never take any relationship to a point where it becomes a burden for anyone involved. Although “A friend in need is a friend indeed” but if your friend is needing more than you can or are willing to give, then it is time to re-think about your friendship. Some friends are always in need of something; favors, money, and help are to name a few things. If you think you are being clingy, you must go through these tips to stop being needy in friendship.

7. Respect Each Other’s Boundaries

No matter how close you are and how long you have together, you should respect each other’s boundaries. Poking your nose into every business of your friend even closest of friends wouldn’t be appreciated. Don’t ask questions about the matters they want to keep to themselves. Make plans when it is convenient for them and don’t force or expect them to meet your timeline. Giving space in relationships is as necessary as oxygen for survival. Don’t make a good friend step back just because you failed to give them space. 

8. Try Coming Out of the Comfort Zone

Making new friends isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The people who are social and extrovert find it easier to mingle with people and talk to strangers than introverts who would always try to avoid the interaction with new people. If you are one such person who has not many friends and you like to keep a distance from people, it would be difficult for you to develop a friendly relationship and there are chances that you would cling to that one friend whom you have known for years. Whether they have shared it with you or not but this clinginess might have been discomforting for your friend(s). 

To get rid of this neediness and over-reliance on one friend, you need to come out of your comfort zone. Try and go out without your friend, start a casual conversation with a random stranger and make a new friend. This might seem difficult at first, but once you start doing it you will actually start enjoying. Meeting new people is fun and you are missing it. Get started now    

Related Article: Understanding and Setting Boundaries in Relationships
Understanding and Setting Boundaries in Relationships

Establishing healthy boundaries in a relationship - Here's how

Conclusion   

Being needy isn’t a positive trait. Whether it is about financial needs or emotional ones, rely as little on others as possible. A relationship requires a balance of giving and taking and the partner who is always in need of something start weighing down the relationship like ball and chain and the relationship becomes fatiguing instead of comforting. The tips might help you become less needy in any relationship.   

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