Lesson 2: Need to Belong (aka Glowworm Theory)

In 1995, a couple of really smart, interesting psychologists named Baumeister and Leary published an article entitled The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. I had the occasion to read this article when I was a student in a social psychology class at Michigan State University. It, to this day, is probably the most influential scholarly work I have ever read in the course of my academic career. This article is the cornerstone of one of my best and favorite lectures in my Interpersonal Communication class - the Glowworm lecture.

My students have told me that this lecture helps them re-frame and reevaluate some of the relationships they have on the basis of this lecture. So, for your reading delight, I present the highlights (i.e. the Blogger's version) of that lecture.


1. The human need to belong can be considered to be sort of a metaphorical bucket that each of us fills with different people who serve, to some degree or another, our need to belong. Some of us have really small shot glass-sized buckets, others of us (myself included) have big wiskey barrel-sized buckets. The bigger a person's bucket, the more relationships we tend to work to maintain with others to see to the meeting of our need to belong.

2. Because human beings are basically all replaceable, we can think of the relationships with which we fill our buckets as Barbies and G. I. Joes. They're all basically the same, they all take up about the same amount of space, and they all service our need to belong in some small way or another. If one of them stops working to contribute to our feeling a sense of belonging, we toss it out of the bucket and find a new one to replace it.

3. Ideally, we want to invest our time in a relationship that does the work of several loose associations we have with other people. We foster relationships with people who provide for a multitude of our needs and desires, especially when they satisfy a need for affection and warmth. I liken this relationship to being a Glowworm. Glowworms are considerably larger than Barbies and G.I. Joes, and they feel vastly less replaceable than the cookie-cutter sameness of Barbies and G.I. Joes. Generally, our Glowworms take the form of best friends, and often ideally, romantic partners.

So the question now is how does this help us to understand the choices we make in our relationships?

Well, here go.

Because our buckets are fairly fixed in size, we can only fill it with a finite number of relationships. When we choose to invest ourselves in a significant relationship with a Glowworm, we don't have the space (i.e., the energy and resources) to maintain our relationships with our Glowworm and all of our Barbies and G.I. Joes. As a result of that finite amount of space, and as a result of our restricted amount of energy to expend, and because our Glowworms occupy so much space, necessarily, we choose to terminate some of our less important Barbie and G.I. Joe relationships. If you've ever noticed that when a friend of yours starts dating someone seriously that you hear from them less, it isn't because they are lazy or mean, it's because they are trying to make space in their bucket to grow a relationship that is increasingly valuable and beneficial to them (yes, more so than his or her relationship with you is).

Similarly, and often more importantly, we toss our Barbies and G.I. Joes out of our own buckets in order to make room to grow our own Glowworms. As a result, we restrict the number of people on whom we can rely for social resources while we are fostering a relationship with a Glowworm. As long as our Glowworm is in our bucket, we don't really notice the fact that we have fewer Barbies and Joes than we used to. We do, however, notice this in a big way if our relationship with our Glowworm ends. Sometimes our Glowworm jumps out, sometimes we toss them out, but the point is sometimes the Glowworm departs our bucket. What that also leaves is a huge hole in the place in our bucket where the worm (and before that, Barbies and Joes) used to be.

That sudden and very noticeable space in our bucket where there used to be a Glowworm, but there is no longer, hurts. That hurt comes from the fact that our need to belong is unmet and, if you'd read Baumeister and Leary, you'd know that that's a huge bummer. Enter the dreaded rebound. Basically, rebounds are people with whom we foster relationships that are characterized mostly by an illusion of intimacy. They fill the empty space in our buckets for a temporary time while we work to reestablish our relationships with foregone Barbies and Joes whom we tossed while the Glowworm was taking up so much space. Sometimes our rebound Glowworm is someone we've had on our proverbial "hook" because we know they want to be our Glowworms, and we take advantage of that willingness when we need a boost in our sense of belonging (humans are such scumbags sometimes).

Okay, so you know that: 1) you work to fill your bucket, 2) most relationships are basically replaceable, that 3) they are ideally replaceable with a Glowworm, and 4) when the Glowworm relationship ends, we notice a huge sense of loss and hurt that comes from an unmet need to belong which often sends us off looking for a rebound.

There is one last lesson I must teach you. That is: Beware the JabbaWorm.

Jabba the Hutt, of course, is a character from the Star Wars movies. I'm not so much interested in the story-relevant attributes of the Jabba character, rather, his physical appearance is what I'm really trying to evoke here. He's a big, fat, sloppy, sluggish, disgusting thing that takes up space and hordes resources. Sometimes, we form relationships that are a lot like that. We trick ourselves into thinking that they are a Glowworm - they look like Glowworms. They take up a lot of space, they result in our kicking extraneous Barbies and Joes from our buckets, and we expend energy and resources on them. The trouble with a JabbaWorm is that they don't give us anything. They are resource suckers. They drain us. They take up our time and energy and love and keep us from fitting relationships into our buckets that do feed us. So, beware of the JabbaWorm, and know when to kick such sloppy people out of your bucket to make room for relationships that are good uses of your time and energy.

So, that's the abridged version GlowWorm lecture. I hope that your current and past relationships make a little more sense in light of all of this information.

Class dismissed.