People need people

Barbara Streisand's hit song from the 1964 movie "Funny Girl," contains the words of today's column title and those words are just as relevant today as they've ever been. People really DO need people. For example, children deprived of human contact, called "feral" children in scientific lingo, grow up to have much shorter life spans, along with other mental and physical developmental disabilities, than do those exposed to human contact from birth.

As human beings, we develop many different kinds of people connections as we journey through life. We have acquaintances, good friends and best friends. We have colleagues and business associates. We have people of the opposite sex we like and people we love. And they're all important to our physical, emotional, and psychological health. When we are deprived of people in any area of our lives, we suffer. Friends are vitally important to our well-being. We need people we can bond with and share commonly held interests with. I am blessed with several friends like that and was invited by one of them and his wife to a Husker watch party they were holding on New Year's Day. There were already 30 to 40 people there when I arrived and I have known most of them for a long time. Everyone was having a wonderful time, moving from table to table, inside and out, eating great food and drinking quality spirits while we shared the camaraderie of friendship and a shared interest in a great football game. This spirit of friendship endured even after the cops arrived.

But friendships take us only so far because everyone has their own separate life to live, especially in adulthood. Regardless of the depth and quality of our friendships, we all eventually go home, mostly to family, and it's in these intimate, romantic relationships where our need for people is most acute. In healthy relationships, we enjoy being with the one we love and the one who loves us because not only do we share a love with and for each other, we've often also married our best friends and we would always rather be with our best friends than anyone else.

On the other hand, if we're constantly being beaten up or beaten down by the person who's supposed to care for us more than anyone else does, we would rather spend time away from them than with them and because of our vulnerability and insecurity, we often seek affirmation of our self-worth from others, sometimes many others, which usually only worsens our problems rather than solving them.

I'm obviously writing this particular column from a male perspective because that's all I know. I remember from almost the day I entered puberty and first noticed girls AS girls that I wanted them to like me, as most guys do. I remember mixed birthday parties where the guys would do anything and everything to "impress" the girls there. It's one of the driving reasons why a lot of guys play sports. It gives us a chance to show off. I remember enduring the drudgery of two and three hour-long football practices during the week because we knew the week would culminate on Friday night when we ran out on the field to a standing ovation from our fans (translation: the cute girls in the stands or OUR girl in the stands if we were already in a relationship). We had a tradition at good old Atkins High of being walked off the field at the end of the game by either our girlfriend or our date for that night or several girls if we didn't have a girlfriend and the guy who played the best game was also usually the guy who had the most girls who wanted to walk with him. We continue to see these rites today on high school and college campuses across the country and even in the pro ranks. Whenever an athlete "postures" after a good play, he's not only telling his opponents that he's good, he's also telling all the women watching that he's an Alpha male, a survival trait passed down the evolutionary line dating all the way back to our cavemen ancestors.

We feel almost constantly driven to continue this posturing all the way through life. What man doesn't want his woman to feel like she's in love with the pick of the litter? And what woman doesn't want to feel the same about the man she chose? We do this a thousand different ways; through sports, through intellect, through accomplishment, through dress, through behavior and attitude, etc. We WANT our woman to be proud of us, to be impressed with us and to feel like they got the best of the bunch. We WANT to be their knight in shining armor.

Most women understand this need we have. No man likes to feel unappreciated, unnoticed, or unloved. Every woman I've ever been romantically involved with had a special knack for doing that. Whether by actions, words, or both, they made me feel important; they made me feel needed; they made me feel like I was the most important thing in their lives and that, in turn, inspired me to try even harder to be everything I could be to them and for them.

I miss that a lot.