Miss Mango

\"You need to love yourself before you can love others.\"

Do you believe this to be true?



I like to think I need to know why I love me, before I can ask anyone else to love me too.

Family accept readily for who you are, warts and all (in most cases).

I know enough about myself to know that when I have low self esteem, I need love like a drug to make myself feel better.

Id rather have a love that nourishes, not feeds.
If that makes sense.

levite

It's not that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else at all, in even the littlest bit. It's that you have to love yourself-- that is, accept yourself unconditionally for who you are, value that person, and deem yourself a person both good and worthy of love and respect as you are-- before you can be able to successfully and happily love someone else completely and unconditionally. If you don't love yourself, and you attempt to love someone else unconditionally, there will be nothing to create balance: the person you love might turn out to be unhealthy for you, and you would be driven by your love to remain with them; whereas if you love yourself unconditionally also, you will be able to balance your love of the other person with your love for yourself, and your own need to retain health and self-integrity (in other words, one can love someone unconditionally and yet realize that it is not helpful to remain in a relationship with them, but this is very difficult to accomplish if one does not truly love oneself).

Also, if you don't love yourself truly and unconditionally, then in essence you will never be able to trust the love of the other person, because to your mind, their love is tainted by being directed to a person unworthy of it (i.e., you).

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

ratbastid

levite nailed it.

Love is acceptance. That's really all it is. If you can't accept yourself exactly the way you are and exactly the way you aren't, there's no chance you'll be able to accept another that way.

Plan9

No. I think "self love" is a bunch of Dr. Phil / Oprah me-generation excrement.

...

Love for another is often tangible. It's caring through action. A phone call, a hug, an email, listening to them vent, making them dinner, changing a flat tire, etc. Doing things you don't necessarily want to do. "I am not you, and thus the only way you know I love you is by the things I say and do." Ms. Cleo aside... we're not mind readers. We know our partners care because they do stuff for us. Chicken soup when we're sick, blowjobs when we're not.

...

Love for one's self? Tangible when you're masturbating, perhaps. Taking care of one's self through exercise and bubble baths and education to get that promotion is maintenance and survival, not love.

Why do I have to accept myself? And how can I not accept myself in the first place? I'm the only me I'll ever be. I'll never be anybody else. I have one life and one body and that's it. I can't wake up and not be who I am. I am what I do, not how I feel about myself. Self-esteem is an manic depressive emo cloud. And nobody likes emo.

I can't see myself without a mirror. That means something to me. A: Avoid the vanity of examining myself. B: Find out how others see me through actions.

Generalizations - GO!

I think we take care ourselves because we have to... biological imperative, social peer pressure, etc. Flat tire = no work = no money = no Top Ramen = starvation.

I think we take care of others because we want to and it completes us.

Nobody ever died of a broken heart, but it certainly complicates other things.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

ratbastid

I disagree, Cromps. Action is action. Love is love. Confusing the two only causes mischief. Eg. now I have my partner's actions to use to judge her love for me, and mine to judge my love for her. Problematic.

Love = acceptance. There may be actions that result from that, but the actions aren't the love any more than the map is the terrain.

Incidentally, when we say "I love you", mostly we're not actually saying, "I experience, right here in this moment, the experience of love for you." Mostly we're saying, "I organize my life consistent with the CONCEPT of loving you." Mostly our love for people is love in principle. And for the most part, that is acceptable to us as a substitute for the true experience of love.

Derwood

i think you have to love yourself before you can accept the love of someone else, but that's different from the original statement

Plan9

I see your point in the adopted-by-most philosophy... but what good are principles without application? I'm confused as to the value of it.

"I think, therefore I don't do shit." - People Everywhere

"I love you BUT... (exception to the rule)." - People Everywhere

...

I loved the guys I was deployed with as if they all were my brothers... and I knew it because I did things for them that could have resulted in my own death. Selfless loyalty.

To me? Real love is engaging in the boring, the painful, the menial, and the dangerous... and doing it for someone other than yourself.

My philosophy:

Love doesn't require puppies and butterflies and sunshine and rainbows. It requires absolute dedication. The greatest love is unflinching, durable, cold, remote. The kind of love you get from god when you're a religious type.

Words are meaningless. Talk is cheap and so are Hallmark card sentiments.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

snowy

Excellent post, levite.

Once upon a time I did not love myself as much as I thought I did. I ended up in a relationship with a man who picked at my flaws, and I was not strong enough to handle it, and began to change into someone-who-was-not-myself. I had always been known for my strength and my spine, yet somehow I lost those things. And when I realized this, and looked in the mirror at myself, I was disgusted. Never again will I let another person get me as low as I was then. Yet because of that relationship, and how hurtful and damaging it was, I learned a lot about myself, and I certainly learned how to love myself in a truly unconditional way.

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

ratbastid

But that's not love. Those are actions you take out of love. You could say, those actions demonstrate or express love. But that's not the same as LOVE.

There's love, and then there's the things you do because you love. See what I'm saying?

girldetective

Whoa CDaddy. You're a rather cold unromantic fish, but interestingly Im in your boat. I understand what you're saying. I dont even know how to go about loving myself, I leave that to others if they will. I look to love others in whatever way they need or I see, be that cleaning blood off of them or kissing them deeply. Its a selflessness. Its just recently that actual romantic acts have come into my life and I love them, but sometimes I find that I really do physically go weak in the knees and have trouble finding words to speak. Its an odd phenom - sort of like a fainting goat - and when I wake up I wonder what happened and its sort of uncomfortable. Its when I can do something for someone else in a loving manner when I feel most capable and love myself the most.

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As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

Ustwo

Loving oneself leads to issues. You sometimes do stupid, over the top things for the ones you love, when you do it for yourself its called being a narcissist.

You do need to like and respect yourself. Otherwise its pretty easy to make your own self worth directly tied to the love of another person which lends itself to potential abuse or depression if its taken away.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

abaya

Word up, I'll second your post Snowy. I also agree with large portions of what Crompsin is saying, especially this line:

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

little_tippler

*shudder*

I hate that phrase. It's such a cliché. I think it's pretty meaningless.

Are you all going to tell me that every time you were in a relationship and you were in love with the other person, and they were in love with you, you accepted yourself unconditionally for who you were?

I think it's a load of BS. We all have issues, self-doubt, moments of frailty. Some things never go away. As long as you're relatively balanced as a person, and sometimes even when you're not, there's someone out there who will love you, and that you can love back. And there's a lot to be said for being able to give love to others, even when you're not in your best shape.

Maybe not love each other completely, but that's another cliché, "completely", there's always some little things that annoy you about the other person and that are annoying about you. The thing is when you're in love, you might just find those annoying things endearing...most of the time.

Generalizing that a person will only find love when they radiate complete self-confidence in who they are and permanently have a smile on their face or whatever, pisses me off and I think it's a real put down for anyone who is single and looking for love.

We already doubt ourselves enough without having to have a soul-searching moment thinking "do I love myself?". I rarely think about whether I like myself. It's seems like such a non-issue. I'm stuck with me, I try to be my best self every day. That's all I can do. It's like that question, would I be my own friend? I have no clue. I can't see myself impartially from outside myself.

The OP's initial statement ranks right up there in annoyance points for me, with the phrase "It will happen when you least expect it."

__________________
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Fernando Pessoa, 1918

JumpinJesus

Love is overcoming ego. Everyone brings their own baggage into a relationship and that baggage inevitably interferes in the relationship to various extents.

When I hear the phrase, "You've got to love yourself before you can love another," I take it to mean you have to learn to deal with your issues and your own ego before being able to freely give yourself to another person.

We are all symptoms of ourselves. Love is symptom-free.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Plan9

At least I'm genuine. I get the feeling a lot of people use the L-word to get laid or in attempts to recover from bad choices.

Love is the weird cookie our individual girl scout sells to others.

It isn't symptom free and they aren't at all alike.

Symptom free love sounds vaguely religious.

...

"Awwh hell, Hitler... I still love ya." - Jesus Christ, Messiah M.D.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

girldetective

CDad: Yes, I agree again. (By posting just part of my sentence you do us both an injustice and take my words out of context.)

Edit: ...and words out of context, as well as injustice, make me crabby, you misfit (glad to see your avatar back).

__________________
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

thespian86

I find being in love with myself gets in the way of being in love with my girlfriend most days. I've been trying to break up with me for years, it's just so hard. And I'm not kidding. Only kind of.

__________________
EX: Whats new?
ME: I officially love coffee more then you now.
EX: uh...
ME: So, not much.

genuinegirly

The way it worked for me -
I had to fully develop my personality and interests, then become comfortable with those traits before I was able to find and commit to a healthy long-term relationship.

I do not pretend it is the same for others.

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy