Please Stop Telling Me I Can't Love Others Until I Love Myself
Or, on Building Blueprints for Self-Love
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Every time I watch an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, I cringe when the contestants all scream out “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you supposed to love somebody else??” I find the words again, as I read Elliot Page’s memoir: “loving other people starts with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves.” To a certain degree, I understand the message: loving others and loving ourselves goes hand in hand. When we hate ourselves, that self-hatred can ooze out and infect all of our relationships.
But I don’t believe that it’s as neat as RuPaul or others proclaim. It’s not either you love yourself and therefore can properly love others, or if you don’t love yourself you can’t love anyone else. Our trauma brains love a neat binary. The truth is that it took others loving me before I could love myself — and I know that I was doing a good job of loving them in the interim. It’s just that I couldn’t apply the love I gave them to myself. Not yet anyways.
From a neurobiological perspective, as we grow up, the love that we receive from our caregivers becomes the blueprint for loving ourselves. If we're loved well by our caregivers, then we develop a strong sense of self-love. If we're neglected or abused, and love is a paltry offering, then we believe that we're undeserving of being loved.
And it’s even more complicated than this. I know that I was deeply, deeply loved by my parents — that is, until, my mother’s death in 1996, when I was 11. Her absence in my family changed everything. I was no longer “daddy’s little girl.” As an adolescent who’d lost their mother, I became rebellious. I wanted to dye my hair black and pink and blue. My father refused and I did it anyways. The result: he would withhold his love, making it very clear that his love was conditional on me being a “good child” in his eyes and the eyes of others.
In a way, my refusal of his rules came from a place of deep self-love. While there was much that I did to make myself smaller, to perform the role of parentified child, I couldn’t sacrifice all of myself. And so I was faced with an impossible decision: be myself and watch his love wain or live my life according to his rules and disavow myself. I chose the former, and I’m so grateful I did.
Still, these experiences in my adolescence rewrote the blueprint of self-love that my parents had set for me early on. With boys, I learnt to accept whatever scraps of affection or attention they gave me. I’d have sex with countless boys through my teenage years, knowing that this was the closest I would get to the love and intimacy I desired. They would ignore me the next day and then call me later when they wanted to hook up again. I acquiesced.
And when a boy did choose me, wanted to hold my hand, and love me for me — no shame, no embarrassment — I broke off the attachment as quickly as possible. For if they were able to love me in the fullness of my being, I’d have to really, truly confront the fact that my father could not. Our trauma brain understands that we must repress these revelations until we’re one day ready to feel the grief that accompanies them.
These formative developmental experiences of receiving or not receiving love from our caregivers result in adults who’ve missed a vital stage in our development. We're often lacking a blueprint for self-love.
And yet, so many of us know what it feels like to love another. We love others in all of the ways that we wanted to be loved. In loving others in this way, we heal. In a way, offering this love to others is so much easier, and becomes the playground for learning to offer that same love to ourselves. Sometimes, what we need to help get us there, is to feel that love reciprocated.
When I met my best friends Natalie and Varia in my early 20s, I finally experienced reciprocal love. In the wedding speech that Varia and I gave at Natalie’s wedding, almost two decades into knowing and loving each other, we joked about how unlikely our friendship truly was.
Natalie and I actually went to the same high school, though I was a year below her. There’s no way our paths would’ve crossed anyways. While she was singing in the school plays and going to church on Sundays, I was smoking under the bleachers and listening to nu metal and doing drugs. We’d meet one fateful day, a few years later, when Natalie came into the clothing store I worked at to drop off her resume. She was wearing this brown corduroy vest from H&M and I remember being so enamoured with her that I basically told my boss we had to hire her.
Within a few weeks, we bonded over our shared desire to escape the suburbs and move to Toronto, one night finding ourselves at a cops and robbers themed dance party that was actually a Crystal Castles show. We had no idea how cool that was until many year later. Within another two years, we’d both be living in Toronto, in a communal home that we called the Nest.
What’s funny is that Natalie and Varia probably would’ve been friends in high school. Both loved performing in musicals and Jesus. But our paths were destined to cross. Varia was friends with my boyfriend at the time — both of them wickedly talented poets in the creative writing program — and we quickly felt a spark of desire to get to know each other. While she eventually left evangelical Christianity behind, the early years of our friendship depended on my ability to accept her faith in god, and her ability to accept my lack of faith.
The love I received from Natalie and Varia was the blueprint I needed. Natalie was the first person I told about my intrusive thoughts and paranoia. I knew that I could call her whenever I was home alone and heard a strange noise come from inside the house. When we lived close by, years after she’d moved out of the Nest, she’d hop on her bike and the two us would walk through the house, opening each door and every closet until it was clear that no stranger was lurking inside. There was never any judgment, not once did Natalie minimize my fear, or tell me that I was being irrational. And neither did Varia.
Together, the three of us build a love that healed those deep wounds from my adolescence. And it is through their love, and through loving them, that I created a new blueprint for loving myself. Because this is the thing: if you didn’t receive the love you deserved from your parents, then you’re gonna have to go through that experience as an adult. And so I wish we’d stop telling each other that the key to loving others is loving ourselves.
Yes, of course, I do think that loving others and self-love are vitally important. My friend Bunny Michael once shared this mic drop moment on their IG: “If you’re trying to love yourself, you already do. Where do you think the “trying” comes from?” I would add: “If you’re trying to love others, you must already love yourself, even a little.” Loving and being loved by others is an act of self-love — because we’re naturally hardwired for connection. Despite all of the times that our attempts at love were shot down, or turned against us, we are choosing, again and again, to commit ourselves to love.
I recognize that there are many humans out there who learnt to love themselves before they ever received that love from others. That’s incredible. And, that’s not my story. Both paths can be valid.
It feels important to name that self-love is a privilege in an oppressive and traumatizing world that denies so many of us the love that we deserve. If your existence is constantly under threat or being denied, if all you receive is hate from a world that is unable to see just how beautiful you are, then self-love is going to be really hard to come by. I want a different narrative, one that stops romanticizing individualism and recognizes that self-love comes from being loved by others.
Instead of placing the onus on the individual (you must learn to love yourself), what if we asked: how do we create a world where everyone knows what it feels like to be loved? We all play a part in creating the blueprints of love that shape our capacity for self-love. We do not do this work alone. So please stop telling people that they need to love themselves before they can love somebody else. It's so much more complicated than that.
Culture Diary
I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to watch Love is Blind UK, but I’m so glad that I did. It’s clear that the producers really cared about vetting the contestants, as this season has so much less manufactured drama, and I was rooting for 4/6 couples, as opposed to maybe 1/5 in the last season of the US franchise. I’ll never get tired of seeing emotional maturity in a dating show.
Like so many, I was eagerly awaiting Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy. While I didn’t learn anything new from her book, and I can struggle with narratives of white, middle to upper class women who’re easily able to access the mental healthcare they need, overall I really enjoyed Tendler’s story and her prose.
My partner and I had a cute night watching In Her Shoes, an early-aughts movie that I somehow missed, starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley Jackson. There were moments where I was really annoyed with Diaz’s character, but I know that the trauma of parental loss shows up in each of us differently. Am glad I watched it.
My partner laughed at me the other day when I pulled Pageboy, Elliot Page’s memoir, off of my to read stack because it’s been sitting there since we went to the book launch together almost a year ago. I’m only 7 chapters in, and while I’m glad that this story exists (because we need more trans narratives), so far I’m feeling a bit underwhelmed.
While home sick with COVID, I blasted through the most recent season of Too Hot to Handle. This is one dating show that I really try to sell people on, because the show focuses on helping these emotionally stunted humans grow up, heal, and foster real connections with others.
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I so agree AND I struggle a bit with these concepts. Maybe my personal experience is trying to make it work with people who felt that they "didn't deserve love," or that "I deserved better," and ultimately they could not show up the way I needed them to. It's easy to say the difficulty in the relationship was because they needed to love themselves more, but it's probably much more nuanced than that :) But, it has created a sense of me being "on guard" scanning for "lack of self-love" as a possible red flag (though I try to remain open and not judgmental). For example, in my last dating adventure I got to know someone who had a bit of a track record of serial monogamy, jumping from one relationship to the next over a decade. I tried to not read into the worst possible scenario, but after a few months of slowly getting to know this person, it was became clear to me that they didn't want a true equal partnership and friendship, they wanted a distraction! A co-dependent way of relating to others seemed all they craved, anything to get away from themselves. I told them, "it seems you don't value time with yourself, or being with yourself?" and they confirmed that to be very true. They keep running from being with themselves, using any excuse to not be home alone. The idea of sitting with themselves with their feelings was terrifying to them. I moved on from them for this and many other concerns. Anyways, it's definitely not B/W binary thinking, but I do look for some level of "being comfortable in your own skin," because my experiences trying to make it work with folks who don't have that have ended up being a pattern of hurting myself.
Overall, I have felt that this phrase has been used against me when I'm commiserating about my struggle to find a healthy partnership. I've been told, "Well, you must be attracting these type of people because you don't truly love yourself." As if I've had a string "healthy" suitors knocking down my door but I won't answer or something?? No, I've just been trying to slowly get to know people, and give them the benefit of the doubt, but typically, my time ends with the person being incompatible. It's not because I don't love myself. The fact that I keep dating even after 42 years is pretty remarkable and a true testament to the fact that I believe I deserve love.
This was a balm on my account heart. Wishing you a soothing recovery!