We Must Love Ourselves...In Relationship

Every single individual on this planet has a way of experiencing and expressing love in a way that is entirely unique to them. Through focused work and practice, as we learn to experience love for ourselves, we in turn can begin to feel love for everything around us. This is perhaps exampled best by the human ability to love other humans.

The attempt to be in a loving partnership with another, to truly support them in their personal path to self-love and self-actualization, to stand in the truth of who they really are and do everything you can to show compassion, acceptance, tenderness, and fierceness for that person is one of the most incredible experiences we get to have as human beings. It also one of the most painful, challenging, confusing, and irrational experiences we can have as human beings.

Trying to find the ‘right person’, or just trying to navigate how to have a sustained, healthy, loving relationship with someone else is one of the biggest mysteries of life. What it means for you to be with the ‘right’ person could never be defined by an external source. But it is essential that the lessons of self-love be applied for loving relationships to flourish. The most important thing to remember is that there is no one that can love you the exact way you deserve to be loved other than you.

There is limitless and divine and effortless love available for you to feel at all times but it will always be a personal struggle to allow this love to be felt. To feel this love is the responsibility of no one else except you. No one else can make you feel it. When we make it our partner’s job to make us feel lovable or loved, they will certainly fail, and eventually the relationship will fail. If we want our relationships to work, we must love ourselves.  

The reality is, we will never be fully capable of loving someone else unless we love ourselves. If we don’t have love and acceptance for the way that we are, there’s no way we could feel that kind of love for our partners. Instead, we believe that they must fulfill some idea of ‘how our partners should be’. We select partners based on this narcissistic criteria, instead of choosing with our wild, irrational hearts. We expect them to dress a certain way, have a certain amount of money, a certain kind of job, and a certain way of interacting with others or a certain way of communicating with us. We think if we have partners that fulfill these expectations, we will feel loved and we will be lovable.

Of course, by demanding certain attributes of our partners, we fail to accept them for precisely who they are, and thus we fail to experience true love. Our partners, by the same token, may have the same expectations of us. In fact, many people remain quite satisfied in relationships like these because they reflect the shallow illusion that many equate with reality. These kinds of relationships do not demand vulnerability, or even true feeling, because they are built on the same elaborate mind game that convinces us if we act a certain way, or have a certain kind of job, etc, we will be someday feel fulfilled and satisfied.

In order to use relationship as a platform to deepen our experience of love, we must understand there is a distinction between our desire to love another and our actual ability to do so. We must come to see the failures and conflicts we’ve experienced in relationship as reflections not of some problem in the other person, or our error in choosing that person, but reflections of some failure we have had in deeply loving ourselves. If all of your break ups or conflicts with others are the other person’s fault, think again. Own your part. If you can’t figure out your part, ask someone you trust, and then, listen. 

It’s not that the other person is always innocent. Rather, it’s that we can never truly know what a person is feeling or what motivates them, and we can never change them. We can only fully understand and control ourselves. Set the example and “be the bigger person”. Admit that you are flawed. Be vulnerable. Don’t do it for the other person, do it for yourself so you can grow. Admitting that you’ve done wrong and knowing that you are still ‘ok’ is one of the most powerful ways to love yourself. Admitting that you’ve done wrong and you are still truly and fundamentally lovable is even better.

“Loving” other people so that you feel loved or lovable doesn’t work. It has a nice outer covering, but it is actually manipulative. True loving is unconditional. We cannot love for any external motivation, not even if that motivation is to feel loved. To truly love others, you must love yourself, and acknowledge that no one can be loved better by you than they can be loved by themselves. If you allow others to be dependent upon your love instead of feeling love for themselves, you cripple and manipulate that person.

Despite deep experiences of love in romantic relationships, many people eventually fail at sustaining these experiences and the relationships fail in some way or another. Relationships can fail quietly over long periods of time, remaining intact to any outside observers but actually rotting from the inside out. Or they can fail in spectacularly dramatic, painful, and hurtful ways. However it happens, the occasion of a relationship where love is no longer being equally exchanged the way it once was is often very painful. Thus, it is a terrific learning experience and opportunity. It is not a reflection of some reality that you are not lovable or not capable of loving others appropriately. Instead, it can be understood as a chance to learn about the ways you can better love yourself. 

For more information about the one on one work I do, visit my website, www.dreamitout.com