Pyramid of Truths

Come off the couch when you are ready to give, not receive.

Maslow’s Hierarchy and the Dating Pool

When we talk about dating, especially in the Black community, too many people jump straight into the conversations about chemistry, attraction, or what someone brings to the table. But what often gets overlooked is whether the person is even in a space to date at all. The truth is, if you’re stuck in survival mode—still struggling with basic needs like food, shelter, stability, or safety—you shouldn’t even be in the dating pool.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lays this out clearly. At the foundation are the essentials: food, water, shelter, and safety. Only once those are secured can you realistically build toward love, belonging, self-esteem, and eventually self-actualization. If someone is still operating in survival mode, every relationship they enter is going to be colored by desperation, dependency, or imbalance. And in our community, this has real consequences.

Why Survival Mode and Dating Don’t Mix

When someone’s primary concern is “How am I going to eat?” or “Where am I going to stay tonight?” They don’t have the mental, physical, or spiritual bandwidth to nurture a healthy partnership. Relationships require energy, patience, emotional presence, and a willingness to give without expecting survival-level resources in return. If all your energy is being used to survive, you cannot give your best self.

This is where we see patterns play out:

A woman seeking a man for financial rescue. Leading with the needle eye or money is not partnership—it’s survival seeking a lifeline. No woman should NEED a man for her basic existence. That’s not love; that’s dependence.

A man looking for a woman to meet his basic needs. If a man is pursuing a partner because he needs food, water, or shelter, he isn’t looking for love either. He’s looking for a caretaker. Again, that’s not love—it’s parent disguised as romance.

Building Before Dating

In the Black community, we face systemic challenges that make survival mode all too common—wage gaps, housing insecurity, mass incarceration, and generational poverty. But that doesn’t mean we should normalize struggling through relationships while unprepared. Instead, we should encourage each other to pause, build, and heal before entering the dating pool.

That means:

Securing your foundation. Have your living situation, income, and safety stabilized before bringing someone else into the picture.

Prioritizing healing. Trauma, insecurity, and lack of self-worth show up in relationships. If these are unaddressed, they spill over and poison what could have been healthy connections.

Growing spiritually and emotionally. A partner can add to your growth, but they can’t be your sole source of peace, validation, or direction.

Love Requires Wholeness

True relationships thrive when both people have moved beyond survival and into growth. Love, intimacy, and partnership sit higher up on Maslow’s pyramid for a reason. They require a certain level of wholeness, stability, and balance to be sustained.

If we normalize entering relationships only when we’re ready—not when we’re desperate—we shift the narrative in our community. Relationships then stop being about “what can you do for me right now” and instead become “how can we grow, build, and thrive together?”