The Difference Between Devotion and Need

They look identical for about a fortnight, and then they diverge completely, and after that it is impossible to confuse them again.

Need announces itself constantly. It is enormously generous in its own description, always speaking about how much it gives, how completely it has surrendered, how nothing else compares. And underneath every one of those statements is a request, usually unstated, for confirmation that the giving has been received and correctly valued. It is an economy. The declarations are invoices. They are presented warmly and they are still invoices, and if they go unpaid for long enough the warmth becomes something else.

Devotion does not talk about itself much. This is the simplest way to tell them apart and it is remarkably reliable. A devoted man is generally rather boring on the subject of his devotion, because it is not a topic to him, it is a condition he is in. He will discuss almost anything else at length. Ask him directly and he tends to be brief and slightly awkward, as though asked to describe his own height.

The real test is absence. Say nothing for two weeks. Need becomes agitated, then wounded, then begins constructing a case, and the case will be about my inconsistency, and it will be delivered as concern. What has actually happened is that the supply of confirmation stopped and the structure could not stand without it. He will not experience this as a demand. He will experience it as being hurt, which is genuine, and which is also the exact shape of the thing being a transaction all along.

Devotion simply continues. It does not require topping up. He notices the absence, certainly, and it may cost him something, and he does not convert the cost into a claim. Two weeks later he is where he was, without a ledger, and when I return there is no reckoning to be settled first. That is the whole difference and it is enormous.

I want to be careful here, because this reads as a judgement on need and I do not entirely mean it as one. Need is human and I am not repelled by it. Most men arrive with a good deal of it, and some of the best ones arrived that way. What I object to is need that has dressed itself as devotion, because then I am being asked to accept a description of the arrangement that does not match the arrangement, and every decision I make afterwards is built on it.

A man who says plainly that he needs this is much easier to work with than one who insists he is only giving. The first is telling me the truth about a real thing. The second is running an account he has not disclosed, and I will find out about it eventually, and I would rather find out now while it is still small and stated.

Need can become devotion. I have watched it happen more than once, and it happens the same way each time. He stops keeping the ledger. Not by being told to, and not all at once. He simply notices at some point that he has stopped counting, and that nothing collapsed when he did.

That is the whole of it. Devotion is what is left when a man stops counting and finds he is still here.