"You have to love yourself before you can really love someone else."
You've heard this before; everyone has. For a long time, I myself took what I saw as a tired cliche with some resentment and more than a grain of salt. After all, I've had a few relationships, and I've struggled most of my life with accepting and loving who I was. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, loving yourself can really seem like an impossible task, so why deny yourself the pleasure of having a relationship with someone over something as arbitrary as self-love? But, like a lot of things you think when you're young, naive, and a little less than self-confident, this sentiment was pretty far off.
Before you start questioning your whole life and relationship, though, a word of caution: learning to love yourself is a process, and just because you haven't fully learned self-love doesn't mean you can't have a meaningful, loving relationship with another person. But self-love deepens your relationships with everyone, not just your romantic ones, and drastically changes your relationship with yourself.
I was like a lot of teenagers - low self-esteem, a lot of negative ideas about myself, and absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with myself. It took me going down the wrong path (more than once) to really figure out who I was, and even after hardship and personal growth, I'm still figuring it out, and that's okay. I've been through my fair share of relationship struggles, and looking back, a lot of why I kept choosing the wrong person had more to do with me than it did with them. See, when you don't love yourself, a lot of things look different to you. Sometimes, you try to fill that void in yourself with another person - and a lot of times (for me, anyway), it was the wrong person. I've always been drawn to people who struggled, because part of me thought that fixing other people might help me fix myself (wrong, again). It's not bad to have baggage - but when you go after someone whose baggage is their identity, you run into a lot of issues. Namely, you start to ignore your own problems to take on someone else's - it's never healthy to act like someone's therapist, unless you're, you know, their therapist - and in a relationship, it's even worse.
You can't be your best self for your partner 100 percent of the time - it's not possible - but when you neglect yourself, and you don't treat yourself with care, when you don't love yourself, it's almost impossible to ever truly be your best self. Of course, you shouldn't ever do anything just to please someone else; change yourself, learn about yourself, accept yourself, because you deserve it, and not because you feel the pressure to be the World's Best Romantic Partner.
Who you are as a person is unique, and it's beautiful. When you truly love and accept yourself, your heart opens and is really and truly ready to love someone else as fully and deeply as you both deserve to be. It's a difficult bridge to cross - it took me several breakups and a lot of introspection - but I'm finally at a stage in my life where how I'm perceived by others isn't on my list of priorities, I love myself wholly and unequivocally, and I love others just as deeply. This is what happens when you begin to accept yourself for who you really are - you see the beauty in yourself, in others, in everything. My life did a full 180 when I finally decided to move past my baggage and love who I am; I'm not bogged down by small inconveniences anymore, I laugh more easily, and my heart has never felt more full.
Do I have days when I don't feel so confident? Of course - my middle name should be "Food Baby" - but that doesn't change how I feel about myself at the core. And because of this, I feel I've grown up a lot, and that I'm more ready than I ever have been to open my heart to someone else (and not just to fix them). Having a mature, adult relationship with another person takes effort from both sides, and I've learned that instead of pouring myself wholly into "fixing" that other person, I should instead focus on loving myself, on being my best self for me, and whoever I love next will love that in me, too.
