The Way to Self-Love is to Be Loved
By: Zita Fontaine
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Advice, Love, Relationships

Of all the self-help and helpful comments from everyone around, there is one cliché that stands out. We have all heard it when it comes to talking about relationships and love, whether single or coupled:

You need to love yourself first before you can love anyone else. You need to be whole to become a worthy partner, to create healthy attachment forms, to avoid becoming dependent or needy.

In many cases this is true, but there is another truth that complements it, and in a way contradicts it.

We are not meant to be alone and self-sufficient. Us, human beings are wired to be in company, genetically coded to be accepted and appreciated by others. Back in the days, our survival depended on it. Only those who were part of the herd — then later the community and society, — survived. Isolation is an evolutionary dead-end, isolation has been used as torture for prisoners, social isolation these days is a root cause for mental health issues and destructive maladaptive behaviours.

Being with others, appreciated and validated by others is our only way to a happy and fulfilled life. If we want to experience intimacy, loving ourselves is simply not enough. We need to learn how to love ourselves, how to appreciate ourselves — and we learn it from the people around us.

The way to self-love is to be loved.

Especially in those areas we are the most unsure about. It’s the people around us, our loved ones who validate our vulnerable sides to be loveable, who reassure that we are worthy of love — in those areas too, where we feel the most critical to ourselves.

If it happens, we feel free to show our emotions, we let ourselves be seen, we open up — that’s when we can experience intimacy, love and that’s what leads us to appreciate ourselves more. By the validation of others around us — not just a romantic partner, but everyone who we interact with and who we are in close connection with — we will allow ourselves to love in a deeper way, showing our true selves.

There is no self-talk, self-reflection or learned consciousness that will make us love deeper. It is about intimacy and freedom to be ourselves, it’s not about willpower.

In our individualistic society, we are expected to be self-made, self-sufficient, capable to solve everything on our own. We should avoid being dependent on external validation, our strength and self-love need to come from the inside.

The interesting thing is, that it is not a decision, it is depending on our personalities, how early do we learn our self-worth and how quickly we can build or rebuild our capacities to love ourselves. Those who are successful, are not lone warriors — they all have a solid emotional background behind them, that is a lot more than self-talk. We need external validation — to be able to accept ourselves.

Those who love themselves in a healthy way know exactly that to love is not a weakness. Opening ourselves up, experiencing intimacy, making ourselves vulnerable is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Wanting to be loved is not a weakness

Yet, still, there is so much confusion about it. Intense longing for love is considered a weakness — as if we should be content being unloved, whether single or coupled. There are some who might have so much love-reserve, who were taught on every level to love themselves, but for the rest of us, it’s just simply a daunting expectation that debilitates us and makes us questions ourselves even more.

Without love and expressing our need for love, we cannot thrive. We cannot get to intimacy on our own, we need human connection to find our places in the world. We don’t need to suppress our need for love, we need to learn to honour it.

Eli Finkel, a respected researcher in the field of relationships and attraction, states that the quality of your intimate relationship affects your happiness twice as much as your career, your friendships, or even your health: Simply holding a loved one’s hand lowers blood pressure and reduces pain.

Need is not neediness

Our genuine and natural need for love has been given a bad rap. Need is not a terrible state, it’s not something to be ashamed of. It is a healthy and essential part of our selves, our humanity.

It is neediness that should be avoided. And the best to avoid it is to give way to our needs. If we suppress our needs, that’s when it kicks back, that’s when it comes out in a form of manipulative or passive-aggressive neediness.

Interestingly the people who most intensely long for intimacy are the ones most likely to find it as love — at any stage, finding it and keeping it — takes hard work. It’s those who care most about connection who is willing to do that work. The more we long for connection, the more driven we are to find it and then keep it.

It is important to see longing as a gift, not a liability. It is those of us who experience the often-painful urgency of love who are willing to do the real work of intimacy.

The catch here is, if our vulnerability has been met before with disinterest or shame, we feel the need to retract and we will think twice about ever sharing that very part of us. If our true self is met with rejection in the world, we create a false self that will make us feel safe and accepted. There is a cost to it, at best, becoming someone different, at worst, getting detached from our own humanity and realness.

We need to value and dignify our needs, even if we were ashamed for them. It boils down to communication, and knowing ourselves, as much as knowing to acknowledge our expectations and needs.

1 First and foremost, begin by accepting and dignifying your sense of need. Try to validate it. Finish the following sentence for yourself: “It makes sense that I feel this need because…” Accepting your own need, spelling it out, finding its root cause might put it into perspective — and it might as well turn out to be because of something unrelated to another person.

2 Second, without invalidating your experience and feelings, try to imagine the perspective of the person you’re with. Without phrasing our own need, it is easy to fall in the trap of believing that the world is against us. The reasons for someone being distant, disinterested or detached can be completely independent of us.

3 Finally, you need to decide on how to act. Keeping your own genuine need and the external circumstances in mind might shift the focus from your “neediness” and shines a light on something different. You need to learn to love yourself through others, and you also need to validate your own longing to be loved.