It isn’t a bad thing to want to be admired or attended to. Both men and women crave attention, at work, at school, at home and on the streets.
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Attention supplies us with motivation to go out and give our best so that it can in turn, fetch us more attention. Yes it is a vicious cycle. But this is how human psychology works.
We are emotional beings and we look to others to validate us emotionally, now and then, while we are on a steady run struggling to keep pace with the ever deadening mechanisation of our lives. Hence, you don’t have to demean yourself for craving attention, either from people you’re close to or from random men. Instead, you need to go to the roots of that which pushes you to look for emotional validation aka attention. Some of the reasons could be:
YOU HAVE SELF DOUBTS
The easiest way to seek appreciation or approval is by working on one’s physical appearance. But even as physical beauty can draw attention, it can’t cover up for long, the factors that lie deep inside of you that in fact need alterations. Why do you need to seek approval from others for being who you are or what you possess? Are there things inside of you that you would rather alter to feel more confident about yourself and not inferior to others? Look inside yourself and seek your own approval first. When you are confident about yourself you won’t find the need to use physical appearance to go out looking for approval from random men. [Read: Self- doubt: How to counter it?]
YOU JUDGE YOUR FORMER CHOICES
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You have made wrong choices in the past that you aren’t proud of and you are afraid that you will make similar mistakes and earn yourself a bad name in future, and approval comes easy from men when you are an attractive woman, so you crave attention and approval from men, because in truth you don’t want to be denied respect and recognition, just like you had been denied earlier. You need to accept yourself for who you are first, to be accepted by the rest. Accept yourself with your flaws holding a determination to better yourself so that you don’t end up judging yourself and look to others unconsciously to act in defence against your own judgements of yourself.
YOU REQUIRE LOVE
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What you’re really seeking could in fact be love and adoration from one individual. You might not realise it or say it out loud because you dread emotional suffering to which you may have been subject to earlier in your life. You wish secretly to be loved by one of these men you have been looking to for attention without letting yourself be vulnerable to being hurt again. [Read: Radhika Apte’s video on self-love]
YOU NEED BACKING AND SUPPORT
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You need someone to help you cope up with issues in your life that you can’t come up with, in the open. You may have grown up in a broken family which might have caused massive emotional damage to you and you really don’t want to relive the same life twice. You are constantly in search for the man who will help you get through your emotional stigma and drive you to believe otherwise about relationships.
YOU WANT COMPENSATION FOR YOUR FATHER’S EMOTIONAL ABSENCE
If you are one of those girls who were less valued by their father in their childhood, when they constantly craved validation from him, you might keep looking for compensation for what your father failed to provide to you, from other men.
Seeking attention could thus be an innate cry for help. However if you try looking deep within yourself and strive to figure out what it is that is causing you to crave help/attention, you will be able to recognise the cause. Once you know what it is, it will become easier for you to cope up and simultaneously get over with the constant craving for help.
