Self-love is required for a successful romantic relationship.
Don’t love yourself?
Forget finding a person to love who’ll love you.
You won’t be able to love anyone else and you won’t be able to accept love from anyone else.
WORSE: Before you can love yourself, you must know yourself.
If you don’t love yourself, two terrible things will happen to you:
You can’t love what you don’t know.
Once we know and love ourselves, we can turn our attention to loving others.
(The exception here is parents. At first, children love their parents whether they are good parents or not, whether the parents abuse the children–inadvertently or not–or ignore them or not.
Of course, later, some people stop loving their parents for various and legitimate reasons. Moreover, unfortunately, there are unloving and unlovable parents.)
You can’t choose your parents or your relatives, but you can choose to spend time with them, accept them or love them.)
THE KILLER THING ABOUT LOVE
Let’s look at the two statements above.
(We’re doing the short version here…this is just one post! If you’d like more on this, just sign up to my email list!)
1. If you don’t love yourself, you will not be able to love anyone else.
You can’t give anything away that you don’t already have.
- If you don’t have money, you can’t give any away.
- If you don’t have any knowledge, you can’t give it away.
- If you don’t have any shoes, you can’t give them away.
- If you don’t love yourself, how can you give love to another?
How can you transfer the love you do NOT have for yourself to someone else?
You can’t. It’s not possible.
If you have no love for yourself you can’t give any to anyone else.
Oh, you can give away superficial demonstrations of affection; you can say “I love you” to someone, but saying this is meaningless unless it is based on truth.
THE WORDS BUT NOT THE MUSIC
In musical theater, if a person can’t “sell” a song to the audience, we say “He knows the words but not the music.”
If a politician says something and you can see he is insincere, you can say he knows the words but not the music.
If a man knows only the words of love but the woman feels he doesn’t truly mean them, she won’t believe him.
His words will come across as false, fraudulent, phony, empty…unbelievable.
You’ may have experienced this yourself.
(I’m laughing–we have all experienced it!)
You’ve had someone say “I love you” to you but you felt strange, you felt the person was insincere…maybe not exactly insincere…maybe the speaker thought he meant it—but it rang false to you.
You heard the words but not the music—the body language or the tone or the way he looked at you when he said it–something gave him away and made you feel uneasy.
You didn’t “feel the love” in the words of a popular song.
2. If you don’t love yourself you will not be able to accept love from someone else.
You might feel this statement is wrong, thinking that even if you don’t love yourself someone else could love you (and help you, heal you) but it isn’t true.
If you don’t love yourself you will not be able to even believe that anyone else could love you.
If you feel you are unworthy of even your own loving self-regard why the hell do you think anyone else would love you?
You won’t think that at all.
You’ll think that you are not worthy, not whole, not acceptable, not valid, not loveable.
Then you would be right.
Not right in the sense that you are unworthy of love.
But you’ll think, you’ll feel, you’ll know (inside you—and who knows you better than you know yourself?–you’ll argue) that you are not worthy of love and so anyone who tells you that he loves you will be suspect in your eyes.
You’ll think, What do they want from me? I can’t give them anything. I can’t give them love and, anyway, why would they love me when I KNOW I am unlovable!
That’s the way you’d rationalize it. It would be unconscious unless you had so convinced yourself that it was true–after years of reinforcement–that you actually felt it in your conscious mind.
You would think the person was crazy, blind, stupid, manipulative, or just wanted something from you and was lying to you to get it.
You would not be able to accept love from anyone else because you would “know” in your deepest heart that you were not loveable.
After all, you’d say to yourself, “I don’t even love myself.”
You would be wrong about your true value but you would believe it anyway and you would base your relationships with others on that belief.
You would push people away from you when they got too close before they could push you way *and hurt you again). Before they “realized” that you were unlovable and despised themselves for being foolish in trying to love you.
No, you have to love yourself to be able to love someone else.
And you have to love yourself to be able to accept love from someone else.
SELF-SABOTAGE
What you are doing is sabotaging yourself.
If this resonates with you please sign up to my email list (above) and I’ll send you a free Ebook called Four Questions That Will Change your Life.
It’s an adaptation of a chapter from my book “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? The way to know yourself and get what you want.”
This free EBook will start you on the compelling and rewarding journey of self-knowledge. When you know yourself you w ill learn to love yourself.
Things are going to be a whole lot better after that, I assure you.
I’ll be by your side on this journey into your self.
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