Our society today is filled with relationships. Constantly our brains are flooded with images of "relationship goals" through social media, television shows, celebrity couples, movies, novels, you name it it's all there in front of our faces. We look at these things and we become envious. We ask ourselves, "Why can't I have that? When is it my turn?". Sometimes it leads us to ask ourselves, "What is so wrong with me that I am unable to have a successful relationship like these people I am always seeing? Why does no one want to have this with me?" Ultimately these questions can lead to self-doubt and a decrease in our positive view on our self-image as a whole.

Seeing my friends get into exciting relationships, I kept asking myself why I couldn't find something like that when it was so easy for all my friends.

This was something that I struggled with for a while and something I still struggle with today. Was there something so wrong with me that no one wanted to date me? I ultimately started to get down on myself and started feeling overwhelming sadness surrounding the subject. As time went on, I found myself struggling with the same thing. Boys would come into my life and give me the slightest bit of attention and I would be thrilled only to realize their intentions were not the same as mine. Over and over I had my heart broken. Increasingly my self-image decreased.

I was shooting myself in the foot, letting people in that didn't deserve a minute of my time.

With my own self-image decreasing, I allowed people to come into my life that had selfish intentions ultimately leading to the further decrease of my self-image. As it says in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, "We accept the love that we think we deserve" and the lesser I thought of myself the less of love I thought I deserved. After a while, I started to realize the correlation between the love I had for myself and my relationships with other people.

Why do we have to accomplish this extremely hard task in order to receive something that seems like it should be a basic necessity?

I know some people may read this and find this message to be cruel. It's hard to love yourself, trust me I know. A good friend of mine once told me, "If you only love yourself 40% and someone comes along and loves 50% of you, you're going to think that person loves you so much when in reality they only love 50% of you".

When we don't love ourselves, we accept unacceptable love. We take in this false idea that it's okay for someone to treat us poorly. We adopt the idea that when someone treats you poorly it's okay because they love us. When we love ourselves, we know our worth. We know how to set the proper standard for ourselves. We know how to accept the love we actually truly do deserve.

This tactic is definitely challenging and time-consuming. Sometimes it is going to make you wonder if it's even worth it. But eventually, you'll receive the love you deserve and you are going to be so glad you waited to love someone until you actually truly loved yourself.