YOU DESERVE LOVE (EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOURSELF YET)
By Deirdre Fidge

I remember the first time I heard the sentiment: you can’t love someone else before loving yourself. Like many firsts in life, it was in high school. A classmate shared the quote with a small group of us, using the earnest tone of a daytime talk-show host pivoting from selling ShamWows to discussing a violent crime with a forensic expert. Wide-eyed, we nodded in agreement. It felt like gospel (although this was a Catholic school, so lots of things felt like gospel).

I agreed with this platitude for years. It sounds inoffensive at first – “Sure,” you might think. “It’s important for everyone to love and accept themselves.” But when you really think about what the message is and the assumptions it makes… it just doesn’t hold up. Like other clichés (‘live laugh love’, ‘never dull your sparkle’, ‘always store meat at below 5°C’) this phrase is very good at sounding like it’s saying something profound when it isn’t.

Of course, it’s important for people to care about themselves. A lot of people spend their whole lives trying to get to know, accept and eventually love themselves. Have you listened to any song or seen a single film? Don’t get me started on poetry. Self-acceptance and self-love is a major part of learning to be a human in the world. But here’s the thing: the sentiment isn’t ‘it’s important to love yourself!’ ­– it’s ‘it’s important to love yourself before loving someone else.’ So what does that mean for those of us who don’t love ourselves?

This phrase implies there is a finite, achievable, tangible goal of self-love that people reach, like the end of a finish line. While life would be way more fun if we got to run through a finish line to a cheering crowd and spray champagne anytime we matured emotionally and achieved personal growth, the reality is much quieter. Very little is linear in life and self-love is no different. I’m still in the process of learning to accept and like myself (love is too big to aim for). I’m not alone in this, either. And I believe we are capable of loving others before ourselves. In fact, it’s crucial.

Humans need each other. When we hate ourselves, we isolate ourselves from others –this is common. I’ve seen this in my job as a social worker and in my personal life as someone with complex mental illness. But isolation just breeds more isolation and does nothing to address self-hatred. People who struggle to like themselves often need people to reach out and love them to remind them they deserve it. Even those who don’t struggle with this need connection – we’re human! We have to be there for each other during the hard and messy parts of life, and the older I get, the more I realise those are the main parts.

People loving us for who we are helps us love ourselves. If I were to listen to and believe the statement that says I need to love myself first, I would not have anyone in my life. I would not have my partner or my close friends. And I refuse to believe that I don’t deserve them – not after doing so much work in challenging that thought.

It’s taken a long time to realise and accept that human connection is a core need just like food, water and a ShamWow. Platitudes are catchy and generally harmless, but this one deserves to be challenged. A more accurate and nuanced edit could be: ‘You can love other people while working on loving yourself.’ Or maybe we can just scrap the clichés and be a bit kinder to each other, and ourselves. I’d support that.

SELF-LOVE COMES FIRST
By Serena Coady

Sometimes, on winter nights and plane rides, when my mind is quiet from a lack of recreational distractions, a familiar plotline glides to the surface. It’s the episode where the girl is finally going to catch her unfaithful boyfriend in the act. She lays the trap – a fake dating profile built from stock images and all the characteristics she knows he likes – and waits. In a time when this kind of love scam is the basis of a popular MTV series, she’s not far from being the villain. But her boyfriend is, as Alex Turner says, a scumbag, don’t you know.

It takes less than a day for him to match with ‘Circe’ and arrange a late-night rendezvous. This confirms her suspicions: her boyfriend is still on the apps and Circe is one of many. She tearfully drives through the empty suburban streets; she’s going to confront him. But then he messages Circe: he can no longer meet up. So the girl calls and tells him that it is she, Circe! He breaks up with her, calling her all the usual stuff. And she responds by driving to his house. It turns out she can’t live without him – lies and all.

It helps me to remember this emotionally charged sequence of events as a TV episode rather than something I did when I was 20. It’s not that I’m in denial about how poorly I handled my first gaslighting, cheating boyfriend – it’s just easier to process if I view my past self as someone else: someone with very little love for herself.

Like most people who were obnoxious as children, I’ve always had a strong sense of self. I’m a confident and determined person. But self-esteem doesn’t always equate to self-love. I mean, would someone who loved themselves literally invent a person to catch their obviously unfaithful boyfriend and then beg him to stay?

When I tried to break up with him the first time, someone close to me said, “Come on, you know you’ll be miserable without him!” And I listened. I wish I had the wisdom to unpack this garbage advice and acknowledge that yes, I would be miserable, but that the break-up would not be a permanent stain on my life – that I would be better for ending it, enduring it and figuring out what I had learnt.

In the years that followed the end of the relationship, I struggled to cultivate a kind of self-love that didn’t hinge on a man confirming that I was indeed loveable. Cracking yourself open for someone else without having a strong foundation of self-love can lead to trouble. I swear, I’m rooting for you, but maybe the relationship simply doesn’t work out, or maybe your lack of love for yourself manifests in unhealthy ways. Self-love helps you bring your best (or better) self to a relationship.

The post-break-up quest to find self-love doesn’t often look like a bendy yoga retreat in Ubud or a rock ’n’ roll shag haircut. It’s often full of tears, letters to yourself and hobbies you’ll swiftly forget. Sometimes, it will be lonely. But it is an undertaking that will set you up for all your future endeavours, conflicts and relationships. Self-love is a home you will always come back to. 

If I had learnt how to love myself and to be more compassionate with my pain, needs, and growth before entering a relationship, most of the chaotic, often mortifying moments of my 20s would not have happened. But perhaps I had to experience these things to learn just how high the stakes are.

I hope that before you set your sights on romance, whether it’s your first flame or simply your next, that you can know the value of self-love, and you can feel it, too. And I hope you don’t invent and deploy your own Circe to get it.

This debate comes straight from the pages of issue 113. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.