Why Self-love is the Foundation for Loving Others
Image via Tasha Jolley
For even the hope of healthy and long-lasting relationships to exist, you must first learn how to love yourself. Statements about needing to love yourself before you can love someone else are commonplace, and I agree with the sentiment behind these statements, but the understanding and the practical application of self-love is much less common than the many cliched references to it.
Loving oneself implies having a relationship in which you express patience and understanding towards yourself. You exercise discipline and practice taking responsibility in your personal life. You spend time in reflection, and work to maintain awareness of your thoughts and feelings, your wants and needs, nurturing them, without necessarily indulging them at every opportunity. This is roughly what it is to love yourself. Most of the time loving yourself is not glamorous. It is the consistent habit of doing so over an extended period of time that adds up to a significant achievement. Which is the case in any relationship.
The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed.
Loving others requires exercising the same qualities and behaviors but directing them outward. The question is why is it necessary to develop this love for yourself first before developing it for others? It’s necessary because without self-love, relationships between people are prone to become unequal and unhealthy. Relationships are actually incredibly fragile and more often than not would be avoided if people really considered the cost of attempting to merge one life with another in any kind of significant way. In order for this process of merging to be successful, both parties must be able to maintain an equal level of independence. They must be able to maintain equal freedom of thought, feeling, and expression. The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed. Self-love is a protective force that simultaneously works for the good of the individual and the couple, or the group.
Without self-love you are at risk of becoming enmeshed, depending on another person to provide your mental and emotional stability through their own presence. This creates added pressure because individuals are no longer taking care of themselves and have lost their independence. They also forfeit their freedom or rob another person of their own. If I depend on you wholly for my well-being, I am admitting that I am no longer interested in the freedom (and responsibility) of providing for myself. I am also saying to another person that you cannot think, act, and be however you choose because I need you to take care of me. This level of dependence makes love impossible.
Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.
The only alternative to enmeshment is avoidance, which is difficult to identify because it is easy for people practicing avoidance to be mistakenly identified as loving themselves or working on themselves, when they are not. Self-love does not imply isolation, nor does it imply always putting oneself first. The misperception is that you need to go off into the wilderness for some unknown amount of time and learn to love yourself before you can come back to the tribe, but this is not the way self-love works. Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.
What self-love does imply, if anything, is that there is always at least one condition for loving others, and that unconditional love is rare and difficult to find. To say that you have to love yourself before you can love others, or even amend that statement to having to love yourself alongside loving others, is to place a condition on love. I think it would be healthier if we realized that there are almost no relationships without conditions, and were more careful about the pursuit of unconditional love. It’s an entertaining fantasy, but for the most part an impractical reality. For unconditional love to be realized, it would not only have to exist without conditions, but it would have to be given in perpetuity, without the option of it ever being taken away, no matter what a person says or does. This kind of carte blanche arrangement is similar to the unhealthy dynamic that exists in an enmeshed relationship. The more I think about it the more I get the sense that it is a sign of loving someone well to place conditions upon them, assuming those conditions follow loving principles.
Self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love.
Love is a learned skill and most of the information we receive says that we should practice this skill with and for others. It is much less common to receive the message that one should make themselves the focus of a loving practice. This contributes to the tendency to first seek love from others before seeking it from ourselves, and to give love to others in hopes of receiving love from them, instead of receiving love from ourselves. Most people have a general awareness, even without full acknowledgement, of their limited capacities and their need for others in order to be successful. This way of thinking, that others are needed to accomplish most things, probably layers on top of the way we think about love and makes it natural for us to rely on others for love in any and all forms. In that sense, self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love. To recognize that you are not only a recipient of love, but a creator and a co-conspirator of it.