The phrase "You need to love yourself before you can expect anybody else to love you" is cliché. I'll be the first to admit it, too, that I used to roll my eyes at this expression. I truly thought that even though I didn't love myself, there would be someone who would come along and love me and that they would fix all of the brokenness that I was feeling--that somehow they would teach me how to love myself.
It seems stupid to me now; obviously there's no one who can really fix me and and teach me how to love myself, but I saw it so much in movies and in songs that it's what I believed. Society had given me this mentality that you can't really be happy unless you're in a relationship.
So, I accepted it. I spent more years of my life than I would like to admit being sad, depressed even, because I was so stuck on the idea that my life was destined to be unhappy until someone fell in love with me. I made no effort to tend to my downward-spiraling mental health because I figured that I would meet the "Troy to my Gabriella" soon enough he would magically and instantly fix me.
Spoiler alert: I never met him, or at least not the 'him' that could fix me. During this time of my life, I was talking to guys, hanging out with guys, and even dating a few of them. But no matter who I was talking to, my sadness just wasn't being fixed. Believe it or not, having a guy by my side didn't magically fix all of the issues that I was dealing with. Having someone interested in me didn't make me in any way more interested in loving myself. If anything, my state of depression worsened as I began to think that I was simply unlovable and so broken that no one would ever be able to fix me. I thought that the only way to be happy was to be with a man, and being with a man wasn't making me happy. I thought that I was unfixable.
Eventually, completely swallowed by my own sadness, I became desperate enough to know that something, anything had to change if I wanted to be happy. I swallowed my pride and completely cut off every boy in my life. I spent two full years working on loving myself and caring for myself and teaching myself that I am worthy and deserving of love from somebody else. I pushed away every guy that walked into my life during this period until I was absolutely certain that I loved myself just as much as I wanted my "prince charming" to love me someday. I fixed myself.
And my heart breaks for all of the girls out there who are still stuck in this mindset and who are so reliant on needing a man to make them happy. It's so easy to assume that someone is going to love you and that they will make you so happy that you will just end up loving yourself, but it likely won't happen. Learning to love yourself is a long, consuming process but your future relationships will thrive from it. You cannot be in a happy relationship when you are worried about the other person fixing you. That is unfair to them. After spending the time that I needed to take care of myself, I found the relationship that I had always wanted and I was ready to take love on headfirst. Loving yourself provides you with a life of confidence and the ability to love someone else. Because while a cute, #goals relationship is important, there's no love more important than self love.
