What Love Got to Do With It? Why Self-love Might Be the Missing Piece in Your Relationships
Updated: Apr 10
Maya Akai, MA, LCPC, CADC, is a seasoned professional whose extensive life experiences inform her practice. She possesses over twenty years of professional experience in mental health, complemented by expertise in broadcasting, social services, and education fields.
In a world saturated with advice on romantic partnerships and friendship, one crucial love is often neglected until we face "dire straits": self-love. It is the foundation not only for a meaningful individual life but for every relationship we cultivate. This article, inspired by deep dives into psychological and philosophical concepts of love, explores why prioritizing your relationship with yourself is the greatest love of all and how you can manage that essential journey.
Defining love: More than just romance
Love is a multifaceted concept that spans emotional, mental, biological, and cultural expressions. The ancient Greeks offered a powerful framework to differentiate the forms of love we experience:
Eros: Romantic, passionate love (for a partner or spouse).
Philia: Affectionate, deep friendship, or brotherly love.
Agape: Selfless, unconditional love for humanity, often classified as divine.
However, the most vital love is what Aristotle termed Philautia, or self-love, which is divided into two types: Healthy and Unhealthy Self-Love. Healthy Self-Love is self-respect, self-care, a positive self-image, and seeking elevation in good conditions. Unhealthy Self-Love is self-obsessed, prioritizing personal gain/pleasure at the expense of others. When you find yourself struggling, the root is often loving someone or something more than you love yourself. True Philautia requires consistently prioritizing your own well-being.
Four pillars for integrating self-love
1. Understanding the foundation of relationships
The way you treat and value yourself sets the standard for how others will treat you. Since you didn't come with a manual, you must teach people how to love you. Without self-love, you will settle for less than you deserve, seeking external validation to fill internal voids.
Instead of operating with reservation and skepticism due to past hurts, learn to love with caution and curiosity. Use past experiences as caution, knowing what minimizes you, but approach new connections with curiosity, recognizing that this person is not that person.
2. Identifying and managing boundaries
Setting boundaries is fundamentally an act of self-love and automatically includes self-respect. Self-respect must be a non-negotiable standard, empowering you to establish boundaries that ensure respect is both given and received.
To set effective boundaries, you must know: your needs, your wants, and your deal-breakers. While you may not know 100% of your partner or situation, you should know 100% of you. When you know yourself, the boundaries become clear about what is not acceptable. If you are in any relationship that is based on the happiness and comfort of others, you may be consistently unhappy because you have never put yourself first.
3. Incorporating healing and wholeness
Personal fulfillment and a sense of wholeness must come from within. Do not expect others to complete you. While the movie line "You complete me" sounds good, seeking to fill your internal deficits from the outside is a recipe for dependency. This internal strength allows you to be more authentic and resilient.
Learning to prioritize healing (self-discovery, self-love) over dealing (perpetually managing toxic situations) is a must-have skill. If you are always making sacrifices and accommodations for others and feel left out, your self-love meter is low. Understanding the difference between Compromise and Capitulation is a jump-start for growing your self-love skills. Compromise is finding a fair and mutually agreeable balance in difficult situations. Capitulation is surrendering, yielding to what someone else wants, often stemming from a fear of confrontation or rejection. Often, compromise and capitulation are confused or thought to be interchangeable, when in fact they are not. Compromise is the consideration of an outcome that can be mutually beneficial to all parties involved, whereas capitulation settles on an outcome that does not consider the needs or expectations of everyone.
4. Breaking cycles
Many of the habits we carry, including how we love, are learned, often from generational patterns of behavior. When you love yourself, you begin to inventory your morals, values, and past experiences, choosing to shed those that no longer serve you or were never authentic to you.
Breaking cycles requires the courage to prioritize your well-being. Reflect on your level of dependency. Ask yourself two very important questions:
Are you afraid to be alone?
Do you settle because you believe happiness comes from the outside?
If you struggle to be alone, it means you haven't done enough self-love, as solitude is often where peace and growth reside.
Managing your self-love journey
Starting or accelerating your self-love journey can be challenging, especially since many of us were never taught how to do so. Here are key ideas to process:
1. Complacency vs. contentment
Understanding the difference between Complacency and Contentment is paramount. Complacency is staying in an unhappy state or relationship for comfort, convenience, consistency, and control; being stuck in a comfort zone. Contentment is being comfortable, consistent, and convenient with your life because you have a deep connection to yourself and the world and are actively happy in that space.
Related: Learn More About Contentment
2. The idea of change
Be wary of the idea that someone or you must undergo "big, sweeping changes" to make a relationship work. While modification and compromise are necessary, if you have to fundamentally change who you are to be loved, it is not the right fit. Your life is not furniture to be constantly rearranged for others' comfort.
3. Be authentic
There is only one you. Do not compare yourself to others or try to be something you are not. If you can't love you for you, who are your partners truly falling in love with? Relationship conflicts often arise when one person begins to practice self-love, realizing they were previously projecting an unauthentic self to please others.
True self-love is not a shallow indulgence or a luxury reserved for the privileged. It is radically necessary to consistently and deliberately prioritize preserving your self-connection so you can experience life through your lens, not someone else’s. When you are whole from within, the relationships you cultivate on the outside will naturally benefit.
Self-love is not optional; it is essential. Want to dive deeper into this topic? Listen to M.A.Y.A.: What's love got to do with it, if self-love is not part of the mix! (Episode 88) via YouTube. Click here to watch!
Read more from Maya Akai Monet Gavin
Maya Akai Monet Gavin, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor
Maya's personal and professional endeavors have endowed her with profound insight and empathy across various social, emotional, and mental dimensions. Engaging in a conversation with Maya offers an honest, salient, and open exchange centered on utilizing mindfulness as a means to inspire and motivate one to actualize the effort and ambition required to live a desired life.
