The Self-Love Debacle
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Defining Love
After almost 28 years of marriage, watching my three children leave home, two of which have gotten married and had children, and dealing with the many changes in my almost 47 year old body, one question that has sat somewhat carelessly, yet constantly, in my mind is, “Do I know what love is?”.
Seems like an odd question, doesn’t it, considering the amount of love it takes to stay married and raise a family. Yet, as I ponder on the many years of self-compromise it took to put others first, my idea of love has evolved and I find myself feeling more selfish, not more selfless, and more stingy than ever with my personal time and space. The word “exclusive” often passes my lips.
Love is a complicated concept. It can’t be wrapped up in a pretty little give-and-receive bow. It’s tricky. It’s dynamic. Love is much more than a noun or a verb.
Self-love, in my experience, is even more complicated, especially if one is in a committed relationship. I would call self-love a real debacle, and in fact it was, until our children were no longer complicating our love with a triangle, which, in my opinion, is not a very love-friendly shape when you prefer exclusivity.
After our children left, I had some major realizations about the course and direction of my life. My identity shifted in surprising directions and with the wisdom of almost 50 years to guide me, I questioned my life decisions in a new (for me) way. I imagine at 60, 70, and beyond, my questions will evolve a little more.
For now, this exploration of what love is and how I’d like to employ it from this point on is constantly before me, and as I thought about the popular topic of self-love in relation to my new-found identity and the courage it has given me to question and correct past naiveties, I’d like to spend a little time here detangling the over 40 debacle of what it is to have and experience self-love.
First, I suppose, it would be helpful to establish a baseline definition for what love is if one is going to tackle the concept of self-love. As I said previously, my ideas of what love is have changed pretty drastically over the years and so this may be a bit tricky. However, for the sake of this entry, I’ll attempt it.
Love is both a physical and emotional experience.
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When I was first married, love was more of a feeling combined with a hope. I felt love as infatuation and admiration. The feeling was much stronger than my ability to act on it. Yet, I believed that the feelings of love would evoke in me and my partner certain behaviors that would qualify this feeling of love, and deepen it over time.
For example, I felt attachment and admiration for my husband and a hope that he felt the same, and that because we felt that attachment and admiration, we would both act in a way that exemplified (my idea of) loyalty, friendship, and passion for one another.
Were we able to pull off my idea of love? Not at all!
There were definite feelings of attachment, and even some feelings of admiration, that survived our rocky first years of marriage. If I could sum up our “love” at that time, I would call it a mixture of commitment to the union, some commonality of spirit, and a massive fear of failure that wouldn’t allow us to give in to the quiet concern that we had made a huge mistake.
Needless to say, our love wasn’t a work of art. Instead, it was simply a hope that if we held out long enough and worked through the muck, there was a real potentiality for something that resembled art.
As children entered the picture, our love was, in many ways, strained further. I would still define it, at its best, as commitment to the cause of marriage combined with a massive fear of failure, but our commonality of spirit was being seriously tested. Instead, that part of our love was replaced with something more like familiarity, which we all know breeds contempt.
For many years, it took real effort to conjure feelings of admiration and passion. Certainly, those feelings existed in moments, but they weren’t the norm. We worked to shore up our marriage and we kept our leaning tower of love from toppling over, but it took real effort, as I imagine it does for most marriages.
Fast-forward to the inevitable stage of change that comes as your children start to fly the coop. When love is fortified with commitment, courage, and years of doing what it takes to make it work, real stability does develop.
By the time our children started leaving, my husband and I knew a kind of love that worked well together. That didn’t mean that we were deeply happy, but it did mean that we knew how to stay together, and even play together, well.
Our love was now defined by years of digging in and doing what it took, teaching and trying to exemplify love and commitment for our children, and learning how to put oneself and ones ideas of love aside for something bigger.
In essence, love had become a cooperative effort, but still hadn’t reached anything worthy of a masterpiece of art.
Defining Self-Love
So, how does all of this relate to the topic of self-love.
Where once I thought love was a feeling and then a committed set of actions to something bigger than oneself, self-love has taught me something different.
After our children left, our marriage and the type of love we had cultivated hit a stale-mate. I hear this is pretty common. It wasn’t that we were no longer committed to marriage or afraid of failure, it’s just that life was getting shorter and we both knew it.
Where we had compromised ourselves for the sake of the whole—our important family unit—there was a serious breakdown in both of our emotional states. The compromises had kept up this tower of so-called love, but the tower itself felt like a symbol of compromise, not happiness, and certainly not fulfillment and joy.
We were tough. Our commitment was tough. But, all of a sudden, neither of us cared about tough any more. We wanted something different; something more beautiful and more meaningful; something we could both be proud of.
Self-love first entered the picture as new and uncomfortable sets of boundaries. We started asserting some demands into our relationship that weren’t very marriage-friendly, at least at first.
Conversations like, “If this isn’t going to change, I don’t know if I want to stay married” and “We’ve got to make some changes, because life is too short to keep on like we are,” began to catalytically alter our perspectives on our future together.
Next, self-love brought in other changes, like new business ideas, financial reforms, and taking more time out to enjoy life.
As we began to love ourselves through some personal and joint reforms to our lifestyles, we stopped making compromises neither of us were happy with. Our personal boundaries became clearer and with that a growing belief that we were worth major lifestyle changes and these fulfillment-friendly reforms.
Self-love and some serious self-awareness after so many years of self-compromise has oddly transformed my definition of love because it taught me that I am part of the formula of love, that what I want matters, and for real love to exist both of us have to matter to ourselves first.
Oddly, loving myself has changed my idea of what love is from the inside out.
Instead of feeling like a worn out old boot that is lovable because its familiar and well-worn in, I have started to regain a measure of self-worth that was lost in the “give all of yourself” phase of my life.
As Erik and I have asserted greater self-love in the form of looking at our lives as more than simply a commitment-based compromise that requires one to become a cyclical cell stuck in a birth and death sequence of non-identity for the greater good, we’ve realized that to thrive one must guard a portion of self to love if one wants to truly know what fulfillment is.
When I was young, I thought love was something equally felt and experienced by those claiming to love each other. For example, I thought true love was when two people felt identically passionate, loyal, friendly, etc. I thought the mutually exclusive feelings between people was love.
In many ways, I saw giving up myself to that kind of love to be the noblest thing a person could do. Now, I realize that was a fantasy and a foolish ideal, to expect two people who have zero experience together to know how to have that kind of unity.
How Self-Love Transformed Our Love
Self-love had another major impact on our marriage and the love we felt for each other, and in my opinion, this one thing has made all the difference.
I mentioned that self-love brought boundaries, much needed reforms, awareness of the unnecessary and detrimental compromises we were making, and some newly felt self-worth.
But, with the liberation and freedom felt as we started to care about ourselves again, came a new sensation, a genuine caring about the other person’s happiness and fulfillment.
Because we had started to truly care about ourselves, we had room enough inside to care for each other on a deeper and more meaningful level, on an “I can see how much you need this and I want you to have it” level.
When you start to feed yourself, you realize how malnourished you were and are. The more you feed yourself love, the more love grows inside of you and you see the hunger and pain in others more easily.
As I began to assert myself and feed the neglected areas of my life, I could see how depleted Erik was and I felt empathy for him, maybe not for the first time, but in a way that I hadn’t before. I wanted him to feel full, because when he is healthy and happy, the man I was so drawn to when we were dating starts to surface, and that guy was and is my dream.
Self-love is revitalizing us, and in turn, helping us to revitalize each other.
It’s not that we had never cared about each other up to this point. Of course we had. Yet, when you are knee or neck deep in raising a family and all that entails, it is difficult to feel complete autonomy in love. There is so much obligation on all sides, one doesn’t have space in ones heart and life to say, “whatever you need, I support that”.
In my experience, and I don’t claim to be any kind of selfless saint, the “whatever one needs to be happy” kind of love isn’t a successful approach when you’re raising a family, but I’m sure there are exceptions that I’m simply not aware of.
Love is much more complicated than Valentines Day makes it out to be. It is an evolution, not an equation.
Looking back over my life so far, it has become clear that I didn’t have a clue what love was when I began the journey of marriage. But, more than that, Erik and I have both concluded that we went into marriage a little handicapped because neither of us realized we were both important and that some self-love would have made our marital compromises much more fulfilling.
Conclusion
Self-love is a debacle because it challenges the selfless qualities of love. Yet, I have found self-love an absolute necessity in understanding what love is and how to both manifest and express more love in my life.
Many people see self-love as selfishness. But where selfishness is rigid and unyielding, self-love is malleable and cooperative. Selfishness is, nine times out of ten, impatient, greedy, and loveless. Self-love is a form of love. It recognizes needs and hurts, but it allows one to identify those feelings within oneself and in others simultaneously.
Although self-love is a bit of a debacle, because the skill of it is difficult to master, it is the key to rejuvenating and revitalizing the meaning of love in our lives.
We want so desperately for others to care about us and to think we matter. We want love to be mutually felt, but without self-love we know so very little about what love is.
Yes, the years of compromise and commitment that held our marriage and family together through good times and really bad times is a form of love. It is good and I’m grateful to those who exemplified that kind of dogged commitment for me so that I could see how to imperfectly muscle through the challenges to help me get to this place I can finally taste the really good aspects of love in my life.
Self-love, more than any other kind of love, has taught me how to feed myself the nutrients of happiness, abundance, and positivity, when no one else could, and it taught me how to recognize the need for that in others.
Self-love is a balm when no one else is capable of nurturing you. It is a healing and empowering skill that everyone needs to cultivate to know happiness and fulfillment, and consequently to recognize love when it is there being offered to you by others.
That question of, “Do I know what love is?” has become so much easier to answer as I have learned to love myself and through loving myself, love others more freely.
Self-love, combined with our growing mutual affection and admiration—born out of a genuine desire for the other person’s happiness—and all the years of effort and trying together, have finally sketched a masterpiece of love we both look forward to completing together.
[Image 1] courtesy of Unsplash.
[Image 2] Erik and I in 1994. This
is the picture we ended up using
for our wedding invitation. What
silly kids we were.
