Love is an expression and affirmation of self-esteem

Love is an expression and affirmation of self-esteem.

-ayn rand

Love is a thing of many splendours. Love makes the world go round. All you need is Love.

In fact, there are a million love songs, but what is love really? It has many different manifestations among a large number of different people. For some, it might be bringing gifts to a loved one. For others, it could be the loved one who brings gifts. It could be fancy restaurants and fancy cars. It could be cuddling in front of the fire. It can be all these things and more. But for all that, these are only external manifestations of love; What is love underneath all that? What is love in your heart, in your very essence?

In the past, on several occasions, I have believed that to show love I needed to regularly buy the other person nice gifts or take them out to dinner, or make sure there was a nice house to live in. For me it was about pampering them, about feathering the nest, but in the end it was about material expression and giving them things. Looking back, I guess he was subconsciously continually trying to buy her love.

Today I realize that as nice as those things are to some people, that’s not what love is. Love is something much deeper than that. It puts us at considerable risk of harm if our love is rejected or unrequited. And that can be a very difficult thing to deal with. Which means that for many of us, we don’t take that risk, so we never give up or experience true love. I know that I have certainly been there before, and I have also been badly hurt, preventing me from having sex for a long time for fear of being hurt again.

Today I am in a great relationship with a partner who I love dearly and who loves me dearly, so what changed?

For me, I guess what changed was accepting that no matter how others felt about me, whether they loved me or hated me, it didn’t hurt unduly as long as at the center of it all, I loved myself. And that is very often the most difficult and most overlooked aspect of our lives!

How can we love ourselves? We have all these issues, problems, bad habits, how can we love ourselves? And yet, if we don’t love ourselves, how can we expect anyone else to love us? And if we can’t expect anyone else to love us, how can we risk loving someone else?

Which puts us in a very discouraging place where deep down we long to be loved, but we don’t feel like we can be loved and we don’t give love. By not giving love, we cannot expect to receive love. and so the vicious circle continues, promoting loneliness and misery; a misery from which we seek solace by trying, however unconsciously, to “buy” love.

However, what if we loved ourselves?

If we accepted, celebrated and loved each other really, truly and deeply?

Not in a narcissistic way, but in a way where we truly accept ourselves, love who we are, and feel deeply at peace with “us.” When you feel this way about yourself, when you know that you are lovable and loved, then other people’s reactions have much less power over you; Sure, it would be nice if that special someone loved you, but if he doesn’t, then you’re still great, they still love you, and you can get through the day. The love of the other does not become a crutch that we depend on, something that we must grab from the closest candidate and hold on to at all costs; rather, it becomes something that we can appreciate and develop with the right person when they arrive, but in the meantime, without that other person, we can fend for ourselves and live life to the fullest, enjoying it. And when we love ourselves, when we know that others cannot hurt us, we no longer feel vulnerable.

And that is the point where we can truly begin to love others and offer our love freely and unconditionally. Such true and genuine love for and towards others, freely given from a place of strong self-esteem, makes us much more attractive to others and puts us in a much better place to find and receive true love in return, because we are not oozing with despair. unpleasant, we are exceeding our self-confidence, our self-esteem, we have the air of someone who will love the other person because of who and what the other person is, rather than because we get something out of it.

Would you like to be “loved” by someone who expects things in return and treats everything as some kind of transaction?

Or would you rather be loved by someone who loves you for you and expects nothing in return but loves you anyway?

I strongly suspect that the latter would make you feel that much more loved and appreciated!

Only by truly learning to accept and love ourselves do we open ourselves to the ability to love others and even to be loved in return, loving simply to love and not out of dependency, desperation or expectation.

Our of the 7 billion people on this planet, you are the only one that is you; you are the only one who can think and do the things you think and do, in your own unique way. What is it not to love yourself? No one else will be as good at being you as you. What better reason to love yourself and know that you are worthy of being loved?

If you don’t feel worth loving, no one else will. But when your self-esteem allows you to love yourself, others can come to love you too.

At the beginning we asked ourselves the question “what is love?”.

True love is really an expression of our own self-esteem. And that can be a very powerful realization and a very powerful position from which to build your life!