On the Importance of Finding Your Self Worth

My friend Danielle is a gorgeous, engaging, intelligent and talented woman who owns her own home and her own healing practice. She’s giving and warm, funny and sensitive, insightful and kind. She doesn’t cook, hates cleaning, and works too much but to sit in a noisy bar with her and engage in conversation these things melt away and you don’t recognize any of the shortcomings anymore because her company speaks volumes more loudly than any perceived flaws could dream of doing.

She keeps everyone she meets, finding worth in every living being around her. She’s friends with all her ex-boyfriends and their parents, has a Christmas card list over four hundred names long, is essentially supporting a roommate who can’t get his own act together because he needs that support and she can’t turn down a need.

Except, that is, when it comes to taking heed of her own.

For all her grace, beauty and caring ways, Danielle still hasn’t learned to see her own inward beauty and gives herself no love. For all her quirky and charming behaviors she hasn’t had a steady boyfriend in years and spends a good deal of time complaining about being lonely. She desperately wants to fall in love, get married and raise a family but to date, in her mid-thirties, she’s succeeded only in raising misguided desperate crushes on men who don’t deserve her glorious love anyway.

It’s often stated that one can’t love another until one loves them self. This seems to be true most especially in romantic relationships and appears to be the heart of Danielle’s issue in finding romance. She gives of herself so freely but doesn’t take the time to recognize her own beauty and therefore the men around her take advantage of her presence but don’t fall in love.

There exists a theory that in order for any person to attract a loving relationship they must first appreciate their self-worth. Love begets love, as it were, and to this end one must be capable of a loving relationship with oneself before a true partnership of equanimity can be forged. Certainly a person who doesn’t have much respect for themselves can establish and maintain a relationship but it is doubtful to ever be a full or truly satisfying one. For that, the foundation must be love for self.

In this case the source of failure for Danielle truly is that she has not learned to recognize and reward her own beauty. She is still looking outside herself for affirmation of her self-worth rather than cultivating her relationship with herself. In turn she is digging a deeper hole in her pursuit of a relationship with a man because when those relationships don’t meet her expectations and she doesn’t find that external fulfillment, it hurts more each time.

We’ve had this conversation and she recognizes the truth in my theory but stubbornly has not put the effort into cultivating an appreciation for herself. True fulfillment must absolutely begin as self-love and an enjoyment of one’s own company and beauty. Though a romantic relationship certainly adds joy to life for many people, a solid relationship with oneself is tantamount to true happiness.