Learning to Love Yourself

In Plato’s “Symposium,” Aristophanes, a respected Ancient Greek playwright, submits to the forum assembled around him that Love is when two people find their soul-mate in each other and recognize an ancient bond between them.

The notion of soul-mates has survived to this day, deluding us about the true nature of love.

There may or may not be soul-mates — someone who is exactly and perfectly right for you — but believing in this kind of phenomenal love ignores one crucial aspect of love that must be recognized for love to abide: love of self comes before love another.

This doesn’t mean that we should all be self-centered narcissists; it means that in order to truly know how to love someone else, we have to know how to love ourselves.

Sometimes loving yourself is much harder than loving another person — you can conform your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to another person’s; can bend over backwards to make them happy; can compromise with them to find a middle ground.

We are often much quicker to forgive faults in others than in ourselves, and can learn to love others even despite their flaws.

What we need to learn, then, is how to take that understanding kind of love and turn it inwards. Relationships may come and go, but we are always going to be ourselves. Your self is the only constant in your life, and for your life to be whole, you need to love yourself wholly, completely. First look to complete yourself by loving who you are, and then any love on top of that will be a blessing, and will augment your life that much more.

By-line:
Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.