Love Yourself! 

I’m sure you have heard this advice many times throughout your life. But have you ever wondered how this philosophy truly affects your relationships? 

In this article, you will find out how you carry, judge, and look at yourself hugely impacts the way others treat you. 

Self love is especially significant in closer relationships like the ones with romantic partners and family members. 

Loving yourself helps you to hold your own in challenging situations and to choose happiness and your peace of mind over others’ pleasure. 

Let’s elaborate on what self-love really is, what it can do, and how it increases your chance of building and sustaining successful relationships in your life.

What Does Self-Love Really Mean?

Seems like a simple answer, but what does self-love really mean? 

Unlike narcissism, self-love is not about being obsessed with yourself or being selfish. Instead, it simply means that you know your worth and are not willing to lower your standards to meet someone else’s expectations, including yours. 

Another important aspect of self-love is that it encourages you to prioritize yourself in the face of difficult decisions. Feeling the need to walk on eggshells or compromise your self-respect in the pursuit of happiness is the ultimate counter-productive thought process to happiness.

Why Is Self-Love Important for Healthy Relationships?

While self-love holds a lot of value in your daily activities, it plays a huge part in creating healthy relationships outside of yourself.

People who don’t love themselves are seldom loved and respected by others. 

Of course, your family members, romantic partners or best friends may still love you. However, your lack of self-appreciation leaves the door open for them to take complete advantage of you. What starts out as a reciprocal and loving relationship can quickly evolve into unbalanced lifting on your end.

4 Life Changing Benefits of Self-Love

1. Keeps Malicious People Away

When you love yourself, you can automatically sense who is communicating with a malicious intent. Your self-love basically identifies the red flags in a person and keeps you alert of their questionable approaches. As soon as an ill-willed person senses that you are aware of your worth, they are more likely to stop their pursuit.

2. Prevents Long-Term Emotional Turmoil

Toxic relationships often stem from an imbalance of emotion and dedication between the two partners. When you’re on the wrong end of this imbalanced relationship, it could lead to self-esteem issues and walking on eggshells to please the other person. Over time, this leads to dissatisfaction, frustration, and even self-hatred within yourself. All these negative emotions can brew within you like boiling lava in a volcano, until you erupt.

Knowing your self-worth is the best aid in preventing you from falling into a dysfunctional relationship where you are neither valued or respected. You don’t have to keep fighting with your own emotions or urges to gain your partner’s approval. Loving and prioritizing yourself saves you from long-term internal turmoil and allows you to live a healthy and emotionally free life.

3. Protects Your Dignity And Future

Oftentimes we find ourselves at complicated crossroads in life where we need to make a difficult decision. Such a dilemma may include choosing yourself or your dreams over others. While sacrifices can make or break relationships, they should not cost you your self-respect or lifelong quests.

So during arguments or problematic situations like this, self-love makes it easier for you to take a stand for yourself and protect your dignity. You end up making more sound judgments that don’t force you to compromise your future. Going after your personal goals should not make you feel guilty. 

4. Builds Emotional Independence

If you enter a new relationship knowing your worth fully, you don’t have to depend on the new partner for validation. You will not be seeking approval from them on your everyday personal choices. 

Let’s use your dress attire as an example. You may love an outfit that your partner hates, but your independent emotions won’t allow their opinion to affect how you feel about your outfit. You can value and respect your partner’s opinion without allowing their opinion or them to diminish your emotional independence. 

When you already know how to be happy with yourself, you can be emotionally independent and mature in your relationship. You can maintain healthy boundaries with your significant other while building a strong and long-lasting bond. 

3 Dynamics You Control with Self-Love

1. Dating

Self-love starts to play a role in your love life long before you find “the one”. When you are aware of your worth and individuality, you automatically attract people who are ready to appreciate a self-assured partner.

Your dates become open and lively conversations with equally confident and independent people. Even if things don’t work out, the confidence that comes with self-love makes you less likely to become insecure and find yourself giving up on love.

While dating, you observe any potential red flag from miles away. Knowing your values, priorities and visions for the future, you tend to take the relationship decisions bravely and without hesitation.

Putting yourself first comes to you easily with self-love. 

2. Living Together

Dating might be mostly fun and games, but living together comes with a ton of shared responsibilities and accountability. The rose-tinted glasses are taken off at this stage and reality starts to hit hard. So after moving in together or getting married, it becomes even more important for you to love yourself. 

Without self-love present, you could easily overstay your welcome in a house that doesn’t feel like home, and end up feeling like this heartbroken love poem.

Without the sense of your value, it is easy to get carried away, rely on the partner too much or be the target of toxicity. Those who cannot love themselves often find themselves in an inescapable abusive relationship. That is why building a healthy bond with yourself is imperative to building a healthy long-lasting relationship with a romantic partner.

3. Non-Romantic Relationships

The larger part of your life involves interactions and dependencies on a wide spectrum of non-romantic relationships. These can include anyone from family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Self-love plays a crucial role in each of these cases as well. 

Counting yourself as one of your top priorities prevents others from treating you like a pushover. When they see that you love yourself, they also respect you and understand how certain limits should not be crossed in the relationship. This removes problematic aspects like neediness and insecurity from the dynamic. Eventually, it improves the quality of all these different relationships in your life. 

5 Ways To Develop Self-love

1. Through Self-Care

Self-care is an integral piece for practicing self-love in your daily life. This includes aspects like sound sleep, regular exercise, dietary habits, and skincare routines. Since a sound mind can live in a sound body, these things make sure you are taking proper care of your physical self. For the spiritual part, you can try practicing prayers and/or meditation to keep your mindfulness in check. 

2. Through Journaling

If you constantly suffer from anxiety, you can take the first step to resolving it by starting a journal. This can be a regular long-form notebook journal or a bullet journal to track your habits. The former functions as a safe place for you to note down all your thoughts and clear your head. The latter can help a lot with your productivity, time management and more by keeping a log of your meetings, sleep hours, meal plans, etc. 

Maintaining these journals will enable you to observe the patterns in your behavior or mental state, and point out the root of your negative thoughts. Then you can take measures to eliminate this source of anxiety and find safer alternatives or approaches for better mental health. 

3. With Me Time

It is crucial to have some me-time every day to keep your intrusive thoughts in check. Try to keep a one-hour window or so in your daily routine to allow yourself this session. You can take a walk, read a book, watch a movie, attend a yoga class or just sit on the sofa with a hot cup of coffee enjoying the view outside. This refreshes and re-energizes your mind for whatever is next to come. 

4. Having A Hobby 

If you have always wanted to do or try out a hobby, now is the time to do so! Be it gardening, painting, writing, or sewing, find something you would love to do everyday and get better at with practice. This will make you more competent at a skill and thus increase your confidence in yourself. 

5. Not Comparing Yourself To Others

A common harmful habit that most of us practice unknowingly is comparing our life or progress with others. So whenever you catch yourself doing the same, remember how all of us are in different chapters of our story. The person who is happier than you today might be sadder than you tomorrow! No one knows when life throws a curve ball at us.

So practice comparing yourself to only the previous versions of yourself and appreciate how far you have come in life. This will protect you from growing an inferiority complex and highlight your victories during self-reflection. 

Conclusion

If you don’t love yourself, you are putting yourself in a dangerous position where opportunistic or toxic people can misuse your vulnerability for their advantage. That is why self-love plays a vital role in ensuring your peace of mind and the success of your relationships. Find ways to appreciate yourself, never lower your standards for others and enjoy a truly peaceful fulfilling life!