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You’ll never have a relationship more intimate than the one you have with yourself. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good. As fashionable as it is to preach about the importance of loving oneself, most people are engaged in a pale imitation of self-love. A love where they don’t hold themselves accountable, where they don’t take their wishes and needs seriously, and ultimately, where they don’t really know themselves.
The truth is that your relationship with yourself, just like every other relationship in your life, will take work. Sometimes you’ll frustrate yourself, sometimes you’ll disappoint yourself, and you’ll have to learn to work with those realities if you ever hope to love yourself.
In fact, the real problem is that we imagine we have any control over whether we love ourselves at all. We don’t control whether we love anybody else after all. Love isn’t a choice. Yes, you can choose to be in a relationship. You can choose to persevere when the going gets tough. You can choose not to leave. But whether you end up loving the person in question is totally out of your hands.
But when it comes to yourself, however you end up feeling, you aren’t leaving. You…
