On June 2, 36-year-old Lang Lang, a famous Chinese concert pianist who has performed with leading orchestras in America, Europe, and Canada, announced on his Weibo that he finally found the love of his life.

Gina Alice is 24. A woman of German-Korean descent, she is beautiful beyond reproach. Not only she is an excellent pianist, but she is also a polyglot, fluent in German, English, French, Korean and more.

Lang Lang has said about himself that as someone dedicated to his career in music, love and relationships do not come easily. He also revealed that he enjoys the freedom that comes with being single, but at the same time, he longs for someone’s company.

In this day and age, people tend to follow trends. It’s only when people around us start to marry that we realize we’re going to be late to the game. Jumping on the bandwagon, we start to participate in dating events and create profiles on all the dating apps. Yet, often when we ask ourselves why we want to be in a relationship in the first place, not many of us can give a confident and straightforward answer.

An American-Canadian psychotherapist, known for his work on the psychology of self-esteem, came up with 9 psychological needs that romantic love satisfies and answers our questions as to why we want to be in a romantic relationship:

 1  There is our need for human companionship:

for someone with whom to share values, feelings, interests, and goals; for someone with whom to share the joys and burdens of existence.

 2 There is our need to love:

to exercise our emotional capacity in the unique way that love makes possible. We need to find people to admire, to feel stimulated and excited by, persons toward who we can direct our energies.

 3  There is our need to be loved:

to be valued, cared for, and nurtured by another human being.

 4  There is our need to experience psychological visibility:

to see ourselves in and through the responses of another person, one with whom we have important affinities. This is, in effect, our need for a psychological mirror. (The concept of psychological visibility, developed in considerable detail in The Psychology of Romantic Love, is basic to my understanding of man/woman relationships.)

 5  There is a need for sexual fulfillment:

 for a counterpart as a source of sexual satisfaction.

 6  There is our need for an emotional support system：

for at least one person who is genuinely devoted to our well being, an emotional ally who, in the face of life’s challenges, is reliably there.

 7  There is our need for self-awareness and self-discovery:

for expanded contact with the self, which happens continually and more or less naturally through the process of intimacy and confrontation with another human being. Self-awareness and self-discovery attend the joys and conflicts, harmonies and dissonances of a relationship.

 8  There is our need to experience ourselves fully as a man or woman:

to explore the potentials of our maleness or femaleness in ways that only romantic love optimally makes possible. Just as we need a sense of identity as human beings, so we need a sense of identity-related to gender—of a kind most successfully realized through interaction with the opposite sex.

 9 There is our need to share our excitement in being alive and to enjoy and be nourished by the excitement of another：

That is to say, you should never settle for anything in a relationship. The ability to love is a gift to us humans, and that is what empowers us in life. We at 2RedBeans hope that you can find your ‘true love’.

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