First Love Yourself: But For How Long & Don’t I Deserve Love From Someone?

If you’re looking for love from a partner, you should first love yourself! How many of you have heard of this from relationship coaches and random articles that you come across online? Have you actually been through therapy in order to fix yourself before you could think of getting into a relationship?

And now when you have done everything that you could and healed yourself, you are still looking for the right person to come into your life. So, when people say that you should first love yourself come on is this some sort of a prerequisite for you to be having love intention and deserving of a healthy relationship?

You are tired and you are literally done with fixing yourself and trying to heal yourself, to the extent that you are thinking it is not worth it to keep fixing yourself. “I am done!” Is the self-love movement somewhat of a scam that makes you even more depressed than you already are?

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First Love Yourself: Why Self-Love Is Crucial In Seeking A Partner?

1. It Allows You To Walk Away From People Who Are Not A Good Fit For You

Now, we cannot negate the importance of loving ourselves first because ultimately it is important to remember that any form of external love is like the icing on the cake.  When you are desperate to seek love from a partner, your mind tells you that you cannot function independently as a person.

This is especially true for people who have been going through various forms of trauma and abuse from childhood. They have a higher tendency to seek support from romantic partners because as human beings we are programmed to love and be loved. When social support is missing from our lives, it affects our well-being and mental health.

However, when we bump into people who are not good for our minds, bodies, and souls, it is self-love that will teach you how to move on from abusive partners and people who do not encourage you to live a happy life.

When you put your well-being before everyone else, you will choose someone good for your future. And this is not just any sort of short-term well-being like your current needs to be loved and given attention to.

When you love yourself enough, you will have the courage to discard people who are breadcrumbing you and giving you the bare minimum attention, but being detrimental to your future. Unmet expectations in a relationship can be very frustrating! Don’t fall in love with potential.

2. It Allows You To Be Self-Sufficient And Independent

First, love yourself because you will learn how to be self-sufficient and independent. If you constantly need to fill your time with the presence of someone else, you will soon be dependent on them and clinging to them.

A healthy relationship would require both partners to have a separate healthy life. This means that you both have different hobbies and activities that you are involved in that may or may not necessarily include your partners.

When your partners are not there as a crutch in your lives, you both will have better quality times as you do not need to tend to your partner’s superficial needs. You do not have to parent your partner. They can function independently without you and your happiness is not dependent on you completely.

3.  You Do Not Put Happiness In Your Partner’s Hands

People become extremely obsessed with their romantic partners to the extent that they feel that happiness will only come when they spend time with them. They often forget that happiness is usually an inner job and it may come from the simplest things in life like having a bar of chocolate after work or having accomplished something big in a career.

When your partner leaves you after a breakup, this is where a lot of people get crushed and go into the pitfall of depression because they cannot function as a person without the presence of their partner.

Sure, a happy fulfilling relationship would elevate your level of happiness! However, handing over the responsibility to make you happy fully to your partner only means that you are losing agency over your own life. 

Therefore, learning how to love yourself first will make you understand the importance of having a strong sense of self. It will make you question “Who am I” to yourself.

Should You Heal Completely To Deserve External Love?

A lot of people who go for therapy to heal from broken hearts often think that they should heal completely to deserve external love. This is probably true because the self-help industry and relationship coaches have always emphasized self-love more than ever to the extent that people think that they have to heal completely to find relationships.

Sure, who would want to have remnants of past relationships being carried forward into future ones? However, the healing job is usually a theoretical work done on yourself. You can spend time alone, you can move to another city, or look for charity work to be done to move on from breakups.

However, only when you are in another relationship will you be able to identify parts of yourself that are yet to heal. When you find yourself pulling away from your partner after an argument, it may trigger memories from your old relationships when you behaved similarly.

It is only through a healthy relationship with a healthy new partner that will you be able to teach your mind and heart how to react differently and heal the parts of yourself that are yet to heal completely.

How To Identify If You Are Ready For A New Relationship

1. You Do Not Stalk Them On Social Media Or In Real Life

Right after a breakup, people tend to keep tabs on the lives of the ex-partners, be it on social media or in real life. Some people will decide to be friends with their ex-partners.  However, this will only work for a certain group of people who have better clarity in mind when it comes to boundaries with the previous partners.

If you think that you cannot be completely invested in your new partner while being friends with your ex-partners, it is time for you to evaluate if it is a wise decision to stay friends with them. People take time off the exes to move on in life.

This is especially true if you do not want to hurt your potential new partner by being friends with your ex-partners, as it could bother your new partner.

2. You Do Not Find Yourself Complaining About The Breakup To Your Friends And Family

One of the ways to really identify if you are truly over your past relationship is to see if you catch yourself complaining about your ex to your family and friends. Are you still talking about how hurtful it is after the breakup?

Do you find it hard to have a good night’s sleep? Do you go over to your friend’s house just to have the comfort of their company to get over your ex-partners? If you still do one of these things at least once a week, it is a sign that you are not emotionally ready to move on to find a new partner for yourself.

When you are fully ready to find a new life partner, you will have moved past the rebound state and will not be using your new partner as a crutch to help you heal from the pain from your past.

3. When You Are Out There Dating, You Do Not Have The Tendency To Relate Experiences To Your Past Life

When you go out there for dates, you do not tend to compare your current experiences with new potential partners with that of the exes in your life. If you always find yourself comparing your dates with your exes and talking about your exes a lot during your dates, it is a sign that you are not ready to invest emotionally in another person.

Nobody wants to hear “My ex has done that in the past. My ex loves this, my ex gave me these gifts last Christmas” as it would dismiss the feelings of people that you are dating.

If you are not doing any of these things and only talk about your ex briefly when you are answering questions related to your past relationships, it is a good sign that you are ready to find a new relationship.

4. You Have Done Some Sort Of Inner Work And Are Inquisitive About Your Own Detrimental Patterns In Relationships

People who have gone for therapy and have done some sort of work would understand what went wrong in past relationships. It is extremely important to identify why things went wrong in order to not repeat the same mistakes in the future. You need to love yourself first to find yourself and identify who you are before you can get into another relationship.

Usually, to an extent, we have played a role in relationships that did not turn out well. We picked the wrong partner knowingly on knowingly in the past. Therefore, it is very crucial in order to acknowledge that our partners are not the only ones on the wrong side as we ourselves could have been the red flags that we didn’t know.

If you have identified your own flaws and have done some level of inner work, it is safe to say that you would be aware of patterns that could hurt your future relationships and therefore you are now a safer partner than you were in the past.

5. You Have Identified Your Wants And Needs In Relationships

If you have identified your wants and needs in relationships, and you know your non-negotiables when it comes to relationships, you are ready to go for dates and find your potential. When we were young, most of us did not know what we wanted in life. However, after making mistakes in relationships, we would mostly know what we want and need in relationships.

It is a good idea to list down your wants and needs, and your non-negotiables so that you can communicate this early on with your potential dates. This not only saves time but also energy invested in getting to know the wrong person.

Can You Find Love Through The Darkest Days of Life?

First, love yourself, but can you not find love through the darkest days of your life? We have come across many couples who met their partners during ugly in their lives.

Their partners have come into their lives to help them bounce back from difficulties and therefore challenges in life brought them closer to one another. If you were to meet someone while still healing and overcoming something very difficult in life, the experience should liberate both of you and not something that adds a burden to your life.

However, usually, we are not in control of who we come across in life. Therefore, it is not wise to expect someone to appear in our lives just to help us navigate through difficulties. 

But, do not block people out from your life just because you are going through a dark phase as life me just surprise you unexpectedly by sending someone your way to help you evolve and become a better person.

Is Self-Love Becoming A Shield To Not Let Love Into Your Life?

First, love yourself. However, when you are fixated on self-love, you may become the reason why you block love from entering your life. The self-love movement has been very rampant in recent days as more and more people embrace independence in life. People think that they only need self-love in life and they tend to disregard other forms of love. 

This is especially true when women reject favor from men thinking that they do not need external help. This behavior only makes relationships a sour experience as people tend to want to love themselves more and refuse to exchange care and love.

Ultra Independence in Society

The society that is becoming ultra-independent is forming more lonely people. By thinking that people should remain authentic in life, more and more people are choosing to live alone and get into situationships just to fulfill their needs temporarily. As a result, people dismiss the need for actual committed relationships.

A real relationship takes a lot of effort and time. It is also more painful and confusing as we are dealing with human beings with fluid emotions. However, it is also more rewarding to be in a committed relationship with people as you tend to build a stable understanding over time. Unlike temporary companionship, a committed relationship gets stronger with time. 

This leads to the loneliness epidemic in the world that we are living in today as more people are disconnected from one another although the advancement in technology is supposed to bring people closer.

My Experience

I have tried to fix myself over and over again in the past seven years thinking that I need to heal completely to find love. However, I got frustrated after a point in life where I was still not finding the love of my life even after so many episodes of attending therapy and finding out why I was blocking myself from accepting a fulfilling relationship.

Here is a truth bomb: you can do all the healing that you want in the world and still not find the love of your life. Doing inner work thinking that it is a surefire way of getting a guaranteed result works against the law of the universe. You are only in charge of the efforts that you take in life and not the outcome of it. As painful as it sounds, this is the truth and the reality, and it invites us to surrender to the universe.

FAQs

What is first love yourself?

First, love yourself means accepting who you are, despite your flaws as well as inadequacies. You should accept yourself for who you are and embrace your flaws while still working on being a better person. Wanting to lose that extra weight? Do not beat yourself up for being slightly heavier on the scale. Accept yourself for who you are and remind yourself that you are still worthy of love at this point in time.

What does it mean by loving yourself first?

Loving yourself first means having a positive regard for our own well-being as well as happiness. Happiness is something that we should not give up on in life and it should not be dependent on another person, and this includes a partner.

How do I start loving myself first?

Self-love for beginners:

1. Identify what you love to do – these activities more positivity into your life
2. Set a goal that does not have anything to do with people in life
3. Identify how you can love people without expecting anything in return. This could mean that you involve yourself in charity works – and this activity would help you to love without any expectations in return, which is essential for relationships as well.

Is it okay to love yourself first?

It is a psychological myth that you have to love someone before you can love someone else. When you have a fulfilling loving childhood, you learn how to love yourself and also identify people who are good for you. Without this love in life, a lot of people would be attached to narcissistic partners just to gain attention and love. Therefore, this shows that having received love teaches us how to love ourselves better.