Self-love is such a hard thing. It's way easier said than done. It's easier to fake than to experience the real thing. One of the reasons that it can be so hard is that -- if you're like me -- you don't feel that you deserve it. You try to replace it with a significant other or a close friend, but that just doesn't cut it. What happens when the significant other leaves? What happens when you drift apart? The only thing that's left to hold you together is self-love. If you take nothing else from this article, take this: You deserve to be loved. And beyond that, you deserve to love yourself.

Thinking back, my last relationship was pretty unhealthy. It was built on trying to replace my lack of self-worth with the love of another person. He did a really great job of keeping me afloat, but my lack of self-love had put us both on a sinking ship. After a while, the dynamic was just a routine. I hated myself, but he loved me, and it was fine. Many therapy sessions later, I started to feel like I should work on my self-worth. There was one problem: I felt that I needed to be broken in order for the other person to love me. I felt like there wasn't room in our relationship for more love. That simply wasn't the case.

If our dynamic shifted, I felt like he was bored or that he wasn't paying attention to me. If he wasn't my caretaker, I felt like something was wrong. So I clung to my depression. I clung to my anxiety. I clung to my eating disorder. I placed so much importance on my disorders that they became a huge part of my identity. I wasn't Neve anymore. I was "depressed Neve". I was "anxious Neve". I felt like "regular Neve" was too boring for my boyfriend or for anyone.

If you're in a relationship where one of you is a caretaker, have a conversation about it. Because it's just not healthy. The moral of this story is that you deserve love. You deserve it whether you're in a relationship or you're working on yourself. If you're in a relationship, remember that there's room for more love -- especially self-love. Relationships don't have a finite limit on how much love can flow between two people. That's absolutely absurd and downright untrue.

We don't let self-love be as important as it should be. Settle into the feeling of loving yourself. Bask in that love. It's such a big part of your mental health.

Remember that you're worthy of loving yourself and your relationship can handle it.