"Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight:

always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?"
--J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird, 1902

"Is it better to be needed or wanted?"

The above question comes from a journal entry of mine made almost eight years ago. I was browsing through my journal and came across it. I have no idea why it stuck so readily in my mind. It's the sort of question that only people who feel they are neither needed or wanted ask. In reality, at the time I was both wanted and needed, but people who are lovesick tend to ignore everything but their own "current" suffering. It is enough to say that with regards to my object, I was neither.

I remember sometime in the past asking a friend and getting a perfectly logical answer. "Wanted," he said, "obviously." To be wanted is to have someone showing a preference for you; the choice is available, and made in your favor. It involves no coercion of circumstance.

I remember thinking that being needed was much more "romantic". The unavoidability of it. A compulsion that has nothing to do with preference or fashion: only need. "I burn, I pine, I perish." [The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, scene i]

Now that I am both old and wise, I believe it's not a fair question. Want and need are not opposite ends of a hallway. It is perfectly possible to both want and need, or only one, or neither. Small was the experience of someone who would phrase it as a multiple choice.

So, neither can be better. Both are good, of course. Being wanted is good (unless you're a felon), and being needed is also good (unless they're after your kidney). Showing more kindness than necessary may result in being both desired and required.