The Big Love Lie
Until you learn to love yourself, you can’t really love someone else.
This is one of the biggest lies ever dumped on us. A huge damaging evil relationship-destroying lie.
This is not opinion. This is not up for argument. It’s a lie.
It’s a pretty little piece of fallacy packaged like a Hallmark card and shipped out to fall, mindlessly, from insipid lips, like some wisdom of the ages.
It’s not true. If you are dull and numb enough to believe it, you need to wise up and get over what you let some platitude-pissing know-nothing put in your head.
How do I know? It’s simple.
I do not love myself.
I never have. It’s okay, I don’t want any sympathy. I do not love myself. I don’t hate myself, but I’m not particularly fond of me. I’m amazing when it doesn’t count and complete shit when it does count.
There is no disputing that.
Guess what? I’ve loved. Goddamn I have loved. I have loved close to the point of no return. I have loved to the heavens and back. I have loved my heart into jagged shards.
I have loved with everything within me.
I’ve been there. I would have died for it if need be, without question. How much more can you love someone? Well, you can love them enough to let go when they don’t love you back. I’ve loved that much, too.
There is no disputing that.
So that horrible saying is incorrect. It’s wrong, a lie, and deception. Don’t believe it.
Here is the truth:
We most often learn how to love ourselves by being loved. How else would we learn? Do we not learn to be loving or unloving from the people who raise us? When we are loved, it prepares us to love ourselves and others, in return. When we are loved, we know a self-worth that is unattainable without it. When we allow ourselves to be loved, we allow ourselves to learn how to really love.
We’ve all got the capacity for it, but what turns a simple selfish love into real giving love, a mature love, is allowing ourselves to be loved, not running from it. If you’re running from it and making excuses, you’re not ready to accept the inconvenience of real love yet. That’s normal. It’s scary. It’s inconvenient.
We don’t find love by searching within ourselves for something worth loving! That’s a dead end. We’re our worst judges. When we open ourselves to be loved by others, that’s where we discover something worth loving. They show us, point it out, give our faults a chance, our ugly scars a kiss, and they judge us with the mercy we do not allow ourselves.
That is love. We don’t find it in a vacuum. We find it outside of ourselves. We grow. We connect. We experience valuing someone else’s well being apart from any benefit it provides us. We illuminate ourselves from the inside out with it.
We all have the capacity inside. We all know the desire for safety and belonging and affection. Those are not love, though they are pieces of it. We know longing and desire. Again, pieces. We know how to value something or someone in our own light but we must learn how to value someone in their own light.
This is love: To be so broken as to believe you are unlovable, yet kind hands that only want to hold you, not trying to fix you, protect your heart and love you while you heal and show you that you are not broken beyond being loved.
“I can’t love you because I don’t love myself…” Don’t ever accept that as an excuse. If someone doesn’t love you, then they just don’t love you.
Love is not selfish. Someone who loves you will not deny you because they need to spend more time loving themselves. That’s another line, another excuse. Don’t believe it.
There is no poetic reason for it!
One of the most beautiful things about love is how someone can love the parts of us that we do not.
Quit lying to yourselves and quit lying to each other. Quit accepting lies to explain away your behavior. Quit believing an idiotic message that has no bearing on anything except that you heard it somewhere.
Quit perpetuating it. It’s a lie.
Love finds a way.
Apathy finds a way out.
Fear runs.
