Love Yourself First

“Being deeply 

loved by 

someone 

gives you strength, 

while loving 

someone 

deeply 

gives you courage.”

~Lao Tzu


Ten years ago I thought I was going to marry my college sweetheart and become
a young bride,which made it all the more devastating when happily ever after didn’t pan out.
When we broke up I felt literally like I lost a limb, complete with phantom sensations of his
hand in mine.
It didn’t take long for a dark guilt to bubble up—a constant festering reminder of all the
mistakes I’d made.
I was highly unstable and insecure back then, and most of my relationships revolved
around holding me up.
In the ruins of that romance, I didn’t know what scared me more: that someone else
might hurt me again or that I might hurt them enough first to deserve it.
I simultaneously felt an aching need to fill in the hole where he’d been, and an
overwhelming sense of nausea at the thought of being with someone else.
For eight years I ping ponged from fling to fling and extreme to extreme—putting myself
out there far too soon or completely hiding my authentic self; expecting mountains to move
or anticipating the worst; choosing the wrong people and refusing to let go,
or choosing the right people and running away.
In each case, I either burdened the guy a body bag full of my fears and insecurities,
or dragged it around myself wondering why dating felt so exhausting.
I learned every lesson the hard way after first proving myself completely insane by
doing the same things and over and over again and expecting different results.
I’m now a little less than two years into a peaceful, loving relationship, and I realize
the journey to this connection had more to do with loving myself than finding him.

No relationship with someone else can ever compensate for secretly believing
you don’t deserve it.

While I by no means know everything, I feel the hard part isn’t knowing what makes
a healthy, happy relationship but actually applying that knowledge consistently.
It’s a lot easier to make a laundry list of lessons than it is to put them into practice,
especially when heightened emotions are involved.

So I’ve done something a little different to explore the different ideas that support
healthy relationships.As I often do, I put a question out to the Tiny Buddha Facebook page:
what’s the key to a happy relationship?
I took a sampling of the nearly 200 responses and grouped them into 7 tips.
For each one, I listed a few simple ways to apply those ideas right now.
If you’re not currently in a romantic relationship, a lot of these can still apply
to the other relationships in your life.

by Lori Deschene