the missing puzzle piece.
How many times have you seen cute little pictures like the one above? or heard lyrics like “I finally found you. My missing puzzle piece. I’m complete” from Teenage Dream by Katy Perry?
These are prime examples of why so many people feel desperate to find or forge relationships or even settle in one. These bullshit romantic notions imply that you are incomplete without a significant other. In fact, you are not incomplete. You are whole, a complete person all on your own. Your value and importance should not be attached to another person; whether or whether not they are interested in you. You have value because you exist.
This idea that you are missing something, or incomplete without a significant other in your life destroys your self-esteem and self-worth. It leaves you feeling empty and hollow. Therefore, you will seek completion by jumping from relationship to relationship desperately trying to fill this self-constructed void. I had to learn this per my last relationship. I made myself believe that he was my world and that he completed me. (el oh el) This ideology, mixed with my fear of being alone, drove me to stay in a toxic relationship that neither parties were benefiting from. After the relationship ended, I felt empty. I felt as if I was not enough without him. I desperately searched to be in another relationship, which I lowered my standards and settled with so many people that did not deserve me. This was because I truly didn’t love myself, for years I relied on someone else to do that for me. I learned that someone completing you isn’t romantic, it is codependent. This is not love, it is an addiction. In a codependent relationship, the lover cannot be their true selves. They must fulfill a role that their partner created for them. In other words, you submerge your needs for the needs of the other person.
Through time I learned that the missing puzzle piece this whole time was me. It was self-love, self-worth, self-confidence, and self-actualization. The more I was willing to love myself, in all of my messy glory, the less I was searching for happiness in the wrong places. When we are comforted by our own self-love, we no longer need to find comfort through external fixes. The most important relationship we have is the one we have with ourselves. Your relationship with self can determine your relationship with everything else. Loving myself not only allowed me to receive it, but to love others as well. (Word of Advice: Being in a relationship should be a bonus, not your source of self-esteem or self-worth. Never put that power in someone else’s hands. That is yours alone. Let a relationship accentuate you, not define you. You are all the definition you need).
