Loving and pleasing are not the same thing. Love has become conditional. Love is not a prize to be idly thrown about as a bribe. Love is serious stuff because we have lost sight of what love really is. If we truly understood love, we would stop playing games with each others emotions and lives and not use it to emotionally blackmail each other for personal gain.
Real love is unconditional love, and means exactly that - unconditional.
Well, you have to start by unconditionally loving yourself. Unconditional love can only be expressed when we have experienced it for ourselves. We expect to be loved by others, but we find it difficult to accept the necessity of loving ourselves first in order to understand what it means to express love. Unconditional love stems from forgiving ourselves and others in order to find the compassion and understanding necessary to know what it means to unconditionally accept a person, and we can only do that when we unconditionally accept ourselves. When we know what it means to unconditionally love we free ourselves from our emotional limitations and allow others to be themselves.