(Un)Common Sense: Do I need to love myself fully before I can safely love another?
Hint: The memes have got it all wrong.
" Love yourself so love will not be a stranger when it comes, and it will come."
Jenifer Lewis.
Q.
How do I learn to recognize healthy love when I have not yet experienced it, have not lived it for so very long, or only experienced it in all too brief flashes and glimpses? How do I write a healthy, safe, sustainable love story when all I've known are tragedies? Do I need to stop looking for love and just focus on myself?
Is it true that you can't love someone else until you fully and completely love yourself?
A.
Dearheart, let's start with something very important:
The memes have got it all wrong.
You know what I mean, right? Those inspirational, highly flowered, repetitive AF generic script font graphics presuming to have all the answers.
I do not believe we have to love ourselves perfectly (and without fail) to desire, deserve, or accept the love of another.
I do not agree that we must heal in a long stretch of prescribed solitude to be worthy of a healthy partnership.
I do not accept that I've got to wrestle all my demons into submission and get an all-clear from a qualified professional to be ready to date, love, fuck, or otherwise constructively engage romantically or platonically with another human on this journey of living.
That's straight-up internet psychology bullshit. It's harmful, half-assed, and misses all the nuance of relationship in the attempt to fit on a tiny 800x800px square in an endless feed of 'perfect loves* and pithy lists like "Ten things to avoid if you want lasting love."
*Regarding those “perfect loves: A study involving 2,000 couples revealed that those posting three or more mushy gushy selfies and raves per week are 128% unhappier than couples who share less, with only 10% of frequent posters feeling "very happy" compared to 46% of more private couples.
Translation: Don’t spend too much time worrying about those mushy, gushy folks. Take all those social media relationships that tend to make your gut twist with longing with an absolute grain of salt. The best and happiest relationships don't need to convince you they are living the dream.
Let’s talk about what I know to be true:
We are creatures of community and relationship. Made for co-regulation. Born for the coming together of bodies and minds and hearts and souls.
We entered this existence entirely worthy and capable of the sort of connection that gathers our far-flung fragments from the ethers and helps knit together the scattered pieces.
Relational trauma does not heal in isolation. You can get only so far on your own. True repair occurs in a safe relationship. I do not just mean the romantic comp-het, knight in shining armor, happily ever after relationship that we were raised to believe is the be-all and end-all. I mean relationships, period.
Fully, completely unfailing self-love that never falters is a make-believe idea created by people who like to play pretend (or who have just lived a life where not much shit goes down). In reality, for most of us, self-love is a nuanced, slippery, and inconsistent little fucker.
Yes, we gravitate toward relationships. We long for connection, community, and belonging. But cultivating truly SAFE relationships—recognizing them when they appear and saying goodbye when safety does not exist? Now that's the tricky bit, dearheart. But I’m guessing somewhere deep down you already knew that, or you wouldn’t have written to me in the first place.
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them."
~Rumi
Let’s let go of the idea that we are required to figure out all this healing shit on our own (or even that we can). However, to find, recognize, and enter into that safe relationship, we MUST learn what we want, need, and deserve. We must accept it, embrace it, and insist on it. This, darling, is a frustratingly iterative process.
We need some notion, no matter how amorphous, of how safety feels—in a direct, corporeal, and undeniable way.
Ideally, we learn to wrap our entire beings around a crystalline clarity about what we will (and will not) show up for. We commit to enacting the practices that lead us toward a lived experience of safety in small and measured doses. Experimental, unsure, and still incomplete, but with a steady belief that it does exist, is possible, and can be experienced in this lifetime.
We don't have to do it perfectly (hint: not possible). We don't have to wait until we've got it all figured out. The training sucks, and we learn on the job (with piss poor management) and some really crappy examples. It won't always go smoothly or come together like the perfect vignette ready to be captured for the ‘Gram.
Life is a messy process. Love is a messy process. Showing up for this work? It's messy, too, boo. I don’t know any gentler way to shake that one out.
So, dearheart, how the hell do we even begin to find the practices that will build this foundation if our only lived experience of love is that of demolition, collateral damage guaranteed?
How do we open ourselves to recognize safe relationships (and turn away from unsafe ones) if every example we have, from childhood till now, paints the picture of love and relationships as something one needs but cannot ever count on?
How do we create peace in connection if we've only known love as a battlefield, and our sole experience lies in relationships we must heal from rather than the longed-for connection we heal within?
The only way I know of is to go back to square one (and then do it again, again, and forever).
Not just when you are single, lacking community, or longing for deep intimacy with friends or family. Not just once or twice, but every time you trip over the landmines life has left for you. This is the practice on which a life is built, and it requires devotion and discernment.
The work of self-love and personal safety happens in tandem with the work of relating. Not before. Not separate. This work happens all nestled up together, entangled, full of trial and error and false starts. Healing takes time.
At some point, the work will stagnate; you’ll need to inch your way out of hiding, extend your heart in vulnerability, and find your way into an expanded sort of practice.
Every time the work of relating gets you off kilter and unsure, unable to tell red flags from long-stemmed roses, return to home base and take a breather.
Do not pass Go, collect 200 dollars, or immediately attempt to round the board again. But also, don’t self-sabotage, end it all, or convince yourself you have to hermit under a rock until it all feels perfect again.
Just bring it back in. All the way back in.
Sit still for a minute.
Settle into your own body.
Make a home for that beautiful heart inside the safe protection of your rib cage. Take all the deep breaths you need.
Until the center, edges, and everything in between are all you and only you.
Until you exist as worthy and whole without anyone else to give you meaning.
Until you begin to hear, even in just the quietest whisper, your authentic voice.
Gather your energy and attention into the confines of your own body.
Get quiet, get curious, experiment, learn.
Then, bring it back to you and sit with what you know, believe, and feel.
Now lather, rinse, and repeat for the rest of your damn life.
If there is anyone who deserves your continual devotion, it’s you, dearheart.
You won’t get there and stay there. You won’t fit all the puzzle pieces together at once. You won’t find the path and never stray. And you don’t need to do all of this work in some solo purgatory while you do continuous and unrelenting penance for not having all the answers.
You can, and should, and must do all this work inside the ebb and flow of every container of relationship that comes your way as long as you have air in your lungs. In fact, that’s the ONLY way to do this.
Nope, I don't believe you've gotta be all fixed to give and receive love.
I don't believe you must resist, restrain, and abstain from all your earthly desires, wants, and needs until your therapist says you’ve graduated.
I don't believe there is any self-love practice (the least of all the kind that involves bubble baths, wine nights, or spa days) that will magically prepare you for the BIG love of your childhood dreams.
I don't believe you need to take a specific amount of time and embrace the nun-like habits of singleness and celibacy to do it right (to be sure, I do not actually believe it CAN be done right.) so that the perfect love of your childhood dreams will land on your doorstep.
I can't even say if that big love is coming, if it will look like you imagined, or if it would even be what you wanted anyway.
Living is one hell of a wildcard; what can I say?
What I do believe:
The very best way we can begin to know (and not just intellectually know, but deep-down-in-our-bones-know) what we want, need, and deserve is to begin giving it to ourselves, tenaciously, stubbornly, in every way we can.
Creating and nurturing safety with another requires you to begin learning to understand what it means and what it feels like to become an infinitely safe home for yourself.
Love, like all the rest of it, is a practice. And that most of us have had shit opportunities to practice the work of safe relationships, which makes it pretty tricky to know what skills to develop.
The more we show up as humble students to this practice, the better we get at doing the thing we most want to do.
The very best place to begin our internships in the practice of safe and sustaining love—so that love will not be a stranger when it arrives—lies in our willingness to devote ourselves to a kinder, gentler, and more reverent relationship with our flawed and fumbling selves and with the entire world around us.
And I do believe, without a doubt, that when we are trying to master something new, even if it ultimately involves others, the foundation of our practice must begin within.
I don't just believe this; I know it.
Does this knowing mean operating from within this belief at all times? Um, no.
Does this knowing mean that I don't ever stumble and trip over my own bleeding heart and fling myself into old patterns? Certainly not.
Does this mean I don't still find myself locked in stories where I look back and get a painful glimpse at my own ability to avoid seeing what was right in front of me? Wouldn't that be nice?
Does this knowing mean I've got this all figured out, so now I get that happily ever after love with a Mary Poppins snap of my fingers? Gawd, don't we all wish.
But I recognize one thing: in relationships where I show up with the greatest measure of self-love, I also show up with the highest levels of care (for the container of the relationship and the beloved).
I show up with the highest level of discernment. The most sustainable regulation. The least willingness to compromise my needs to hold another. From here, I can love (and be loved) with the greatest amount of safety available.
Is it still practice and process and messy and damn hard work? Yup. Do I fuck shit up for myself on the regular? Unfortunately, I do.
But I have learned to continuously ask some questions:
What does it feel like to care for my relationship when I'm grounded in care and compassion for myself?
What does it feel like to touch my beloved when I can trust myself to bring my own body to ecstasy?
What does it feel like to hold boundaries with a partner or friend when I've mastered the art of showing up for my own life with discipline and surety?
What does it feel like to open myself in vulnerability to another to receive what I need when I've been actively working on giving to myself?
I don't know that I've even scratched the surface of answering these questions fully in my own life. Truth be told, I don't know that I ever will. But, because I am a writer, I understand that knowing which questions you want to answer is often more than half of the battle.
When we seek answers to the right questions, we live our way into new ways of being, seeing, and loving. Guaranteed.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
What does this mean for me? No matter where I exist in relationship to another, I am continually practicing the art of creating a sacred container that holds only me.
These two paths are not separate, distinct, and defined. They happen in tandem, overlap, twist, and entwine before diverging and distinguishing themselves again. But the work of self and other does not need to exist on a chronological timeline with the possibility of one only opening when the other is complete and wrapped with a bow.
When it comes to healing trauma (damage, rupture, wounding, disappointment, fear) that was born in relationship, it will always, ultimately, be BOTH/AND.
It means I am learning to be more and more careful about noticing the spaces where the edges blur and blend, and the distinction between myself and the other begins to merge in constricting or harmful ways.
It means that when I forget all this knowing. When those rough edges in me chafe against the sharp corners of another. When I find myself attempting to superglue misaligned pieces to keep the whole thing from falling apart. If I get lucky, I will have gained just enough muscle memory to put away the glue and enough grace to allow the undoing to happen without undoing myself in an attempt to prevent it.
Maybe not immediately. Perhaps not enough fast enough to walk away unscathed. But every time, I notice even the most subtle changes. How much faster the knowing landed. How much more quickly I found my way back home to the center of my being. How much less time I was willing to stay in a space that led to constriction, diminishment, or damage.
Like anything else I write about, I expect I'll spend the rest of this lifetime in a valiant attempt to get these lessons to cement themselves in my bones, recognizing myself when I get it and picking up the pieces when I don't.
There is no question that most of us yearn for good, safe, trustworthy love. We are creatures of co-regulation and interdependence and a shared spirit of facing life as more than just our singular (not single) selves.
Whether community care, romantic love, or the gathering of chosen family—we are relational beings.
But none of it starts out there, during some kind of epic meet cute, across a fancy candle-lit table, or in the raw body-to-body release. It's not found at the huge Thanksgiving dinner with all the generations gathered in perfect harmony. And you won’t find the answer on Instagram.
It has to start in the center. Your raw, messy, yearning, fumbling center. It has to start with becoming familiar, in slow and small ways, with what safe love feels like when you build a home inside your being and invite love to stay.
Right here. Right now. Forever.
Yes, dearheart.
You are your own greatest love story.
Your own knight on a white horse.
Your own fairytale rescue.
You are the safest space.
The light in the dark.
The wayfinder to all that is true.
Don't trust those internet experts with their clever little memes listing timelines and absolutes and hard and fast rules of engagement (yes, that includes the ones I post).
A safe relationship begins with trusting yourself. Learning to listen and notice what is true for YOU.
And then, to test it all out—you’re going to have to be in some sort of connection. Otherwise, the knowledge is theoretical, neat, and tidy, but untested. Until you are willing to be vulnerable enough to step into the circle, you’ll never know how much you already know or how much you have left to learn.
So no, dearheart, you don't have to get this all figured out to meet the potential of love with open arms and a clear heart. But nothing will make it easier to let that love in than to start getting right with yourself before it arrives and continuing your work once it’s here.
Love yourself so very well that the kind of holy-good-god-damn loving you've been longing for will not be a stranger when it comes.
Because you, my dear, were not meant to be a stranger to love.
And I know that love does not wish to be a stranger to you.
I'll be right there with you, devoted to the same practice.
It's got to begin with that.
(Un)Common Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, and by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quickly and with surety, often from somewhere outside myself or from beyond what I was aware I knew.
If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond – please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have – that I will honor it and keep it safe.
As usual, you spoke straight to the core of my being. I have gotten so much better at the recognising of healthy relationships, but I am still struggling with the knowing of myself enough and loving myself deeply enough to ask for what I need and accept nothing less. As you say, it's an ongoing and never ending process.
Feeling chills after reading this!