You Can't Ask Someone to Throw You a Surprise Birthday Party

Why? Because it devalues the result. To communicate your needs is healthy, but to attempt to control another person's behavior - to manipulate or coerce or to shame or threaten someone into giving you what you want - is not.

We might think we are just making sure our needs are getting met, but when we do it in this way, we feel worse than empty.

Love, help, time, gratitude... these things must all be freely given in order to have meaning. When not born of free will, these gifts are all tainted, laced with guilt, resentment, and dishonesty. Instead of filling us up, they poison us.

So while we should ensure that our needs and desires are being met, it should be by communicating these things to a person who, because of love, wants to - and is able to - provide them.

Just as you cannot make someone love you, you cannot make someone give you the fruits of love freely given.