138. The “you can’t love someone else until you love yourself” idea is false.

You can be broken and be taught how to love.

“You can’t love someone else until you love yourself”

If I had a euro for every time I’ve heard this sentence or been told it, I’d have enough money to buy a house. I used to think it was true and thought that I had to fix myself before anyone else would love me. But how was I supposed to love myself if no one had loved me in a healthy way before?

We learn to love by observing and experiencing the love we’re given as children from the adults in our lives growing up. However, if they aren’t doing well in the love department, what sort of people are we learning from? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s everyone else’s fault that I had no self-love, however I do think that their behaviour and way of showing affection shaped me into who I was. 

I wasn’t the most popular kid at primary school nor did I fit in very well, so this meant that I’d take anyone who would have me as a friend. This same pattern repeated itself when I was in high school leading me into a toxic and violent relationship for four years. Said relationship isolated me from pretty much everyone around me and so I was lacking in the friendship department too. Later on, and by chance, a few people tried to make me see that I needed to love myself, gain self-confidence and break out of the negative patterns I was drowning in, but at the time their counterbalance wasn’t strong enough.

That terrible first relationship came to an abrupt end and I moved away to study at university in a different city. I step foot in my new city saying “I don’t want anything to do with boys ever again” because I’d gone through hell the past four years with the first guy and then the summer before leaving for uni, I ended up falling for someone with an angelic soul that I wasn’t going to see again once classes had started. Those events were enough for me to never believe in love or relationships ever again because up until now, they’d never gone well.

This is the exact moment when I started to believe that I had to learn to love myself before loving anyone else. I thought that I was the reason the relationships never worked. The Perks of Being a Wallflower quote was a crowd favourite at the time too “we accept the love we think we deserve” so that must have meant that I thought I was either a piece of shit and a punching bag or non deserving of functional, healthy relationships because that’s what I got. I believed for a long time that it was my fault for not knowing that I deserved better and loving myself more. But again, how was I supposed to know what a secure attachment looked like when I’d never experienced one? 

Based on the fact that I wasn’t taught about self-love at home and had no idea what a healthy friendship or relationship looked like, I kept accepting breadcrumbs even while being aware of how terrible it felt. I knew that other attachment styles existed because I could see them happening around me but I never believed them to be something I could have. Looking at it now, I was too used to everything being dark and difficult for me to believe that I was deserving of people that loved me in a healthy way. The latter mixed with “you need to love yourself first” is what led me to accepting that I’d never experience any of those things and to just give up.

“You can’t love someone else until you love yourself” did nothing but condition me into thinking that love without fear and control was a fairytale.

I agree that self-love comes from within and that everybody deserves to love themselves just as they are—My life changed when I started to love myself, forgive myself, take care of myself and put my needs first. But we don’t have to do it all by ourselves. Humans naturally thrive in community but we live in a society that pushes us to be individualistic. They say “it takes a village to raise a child” but it also takes a village to heal a broken heart, to mourn the loss of a loved one and to be guided towards the light at the end of a dark tunnel.

<3

Even though I said I moved to university hating guys and wanting to be single for the rest of my life, I fell in love with someone after a month of being there. I knew the day I met him that all of my plans to live alone were about to be broken, and they were shattered. Luckily, history didn’t repeat itself because I was presented with the first person that would heal every wound in my body and soul, and how? By simply loving me exactly as I was and wanting me to be the best version of myself, a version I’d never met but somehow, he could see. 

At that moment, I had no idea that he was helping me or healing me, but I do remember thinking on various occasions “he’s not mad at me?” or “I didn’t do anything wrong?” and not understanding. My brain had no idea what anything meant anymore and I could feel the walls I’d built slowly crumbling. If I spoke to him about a guy-friend from class, he’d act completely normal when I was used to my ex lashing out if I looked at a guy in the street, never mind actually befriending one. Now I could do what I saw other people with healthy attachments do and still have a boyfriend that loved me. He didn’t want me to be his and only his, he didn’t want to lock me away in a tower. He wanted everyone in my life to love me for who I was. Every single thing I’d learnt in my previous relationship was being dissolved thanks to his way of loving me. And that’s all it took, being loved in a healthy way.

It took a long time for him to peel off each layer of hatred I had covering my eyes every time I looked in the mirror. I was being taught to see what he saw. Eight years ago it would have been impossible for me to learn to see what he could see without his help. He loved me in a way that nobody had done before, he gave me confidence when I had none. He stared into my deep wounds and healed them day after day when I couldn’t even acknowledge their existence. He held my hand when I was shaking and scared. He walked by my side when I felt small and squashable. He spoke up for me when I had no voice and needed to defend myself. He pushed me to places I’d never been allowed to go before. He taught me how to trust other people and allow them to love me. He taught me how to love myself. 

It’s easier to learn how to love yourself when someone else has loved you profoundly, wholeheartedly and selflessly. Once you’ve felt this type of love, you know how it should feel and you learn how to repeat the patterns until they become the way you treat yourself. So yes, you can spend your life learning about how to love yourself while pushing everyone that wants to love you away, or you can allow your wounds to show and let someone bandage them up while teaching you how to do it yourself. Because “If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite , waiting for the heart to awaken.” —Bell Hooks.

STUFF I WANT TO SHARE ↓

I want to write about my experience with therapy, how it helped me and how my vision about it has shifted brutally. I’ve gone from being a “yes, yes, yes!!!! everyone get therapy” to seeing things in a different way and have a lot to say about it. Until I find the words,

Haley Nahman

has written this really interesting piece called “Against self-analysis” that is (a lot) of food for thought.

Since being in France where the second hand culture is absolutely nuts, I’ve stopped buying clothes in shops because 1. the quality is usually diabolical and 2. I like finding random pieces and creating my own style. I’ve started to learn more about what the garments are made of, what’s good for your body and what materials last.

Girl Moss

shared this great piece called “How To Buy Well” all about buying good quality pieces that last and I recommend you giving it a read.

I spoke about not fitting in at school in this essay and my dear friend

Meri Aldeguer

wrote a beautiful piece on being weird and not fitting in called “Distinto”. Her newsletter feels like the white heart emoji and her newsletter’s name is fitting to how it feels every time I receive one of her letters.

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This is also the last Monday before our Dimanche merch pre-sale ends so if you haven’t seen them or have been thinking about getting one, now is your chance.

C, my boyfriend, and I have an online shop called Dimanche Objects and we’ve just made our first ever merch collection. C and I do all of the designing and screen printing ourselves in our mini studio. The clothes are now available for purchase in our online shop here and will be made + shipped at the end of June. We’re doing a pre-sale because we don’t want to have stock, it’s a one time only situation. We hope you love them as much as we do ❤️