“Love yourself” is a relatively new cultural concept, which now seems everywhere in popular culture as life advice. This idea is often applied to romantic relationships: you must learn to love yourself before you can truly love or be loved. There’s rarely an actual reason given for this meme, since memes are always taken as self-explanatory. As a social media culture, we love the stark simplicity of a catchy meme, just as we love clickbait headlines: it makes a complicated thought or situation seem clear as black from white – it’s pleasantly lazy, like a student copying AI rather than doing the work of reading and writing. 

What does “loving yourself” actually mean? Though the meme is vague, looking closely at its uses, the “love” we are supposed to have for ourselves seems close to what used to be called “self-esteem,” having a strong sense of one’s own worth and therefore knowing what we deserve in life (presumably, a lot). Here, “love for yourself” appears to mean “putting yourself first”, even if it means being selfish. And in fact, I agree it’s reasonable that self-doubt and lack of confidence can have a negative impact on all social relations, including work and friendships, not just romantic ones. It’s a fine line when putting yourself first is “healthy” or just plain selfish, even narcissistic, though. So that complicates the obvious truth of it too.

On the other hand, “self-love” has also been fastened to self-acceptance, which is related but not quite the same as self-esteem. In this usage, according to Psychology Today, self-love is “being comfortable with all your feelings,” “being kind to yourself when you feel bad,” and “forgiving yourself”, all derived from Freud’s century-old theory about bringing a buried sense of shame to the surface so you can heal from childhood wounds. Nothing new here, except it has a new name.

But is it true that you won’t find romantic love until you “love yourself”? There’s no way to objectively test out this truism, because there’s no objective way to measure any individual’s level of “self-love”, which doesn’t even have a stable definition. What’s more, individuals are hardly stable themselves – we tend to fluctuate in moods over time, sometimes even hour to hour, and our shifting experiences and environments surely play a huge part in this fluctuation. Maybe, for example, “I love myself” when I wake up, but not so much when I screw up later that day at work. I’m down in the dumps the whole day, but then I tell the story to friends in the evening, we all have a laugh, and I’ve “forgiven myself” by bedtime. Is that self-love? All of it, or only certain moments or parts, since I spent most of my time feeling bad about myself? Is the answer to the question “Do I love myself?” really a simple Yes or No?

My educated guess is that it’s very possible to have a loving relationship whether or not you generally “love yourself,” just because there’s no actual reason why that meme should be true. I suspect that if we insist that everyone who has a loving romantic relationship must have a certifiable level of self-love as a prerequisite, there would be far fewer relationships we would count as romantic. So…is it helpful to be told “You won’t find love until you love yourself?” Maybe loving and being loved is a generator of self-love, not the prerequisite, after all.

I have a personal stake in this meme, because I’ve heard it about myself so many times, and it has never rung true. If it’s hard to find “successful” love, it must be your fault, conclude some professionals, and, applied to me, the cause is that I feel I don’t deserve love, and therefore don’t love myself. In fact, I like myself a lot, and I not only feel deserving of love, but I’m more confident of men’s romantic attraction to me than many women are, based on the number of dates I’ve turned down. I’m very sure I know what I want, and I’m not in the least afraid to pursue it. I resent that for an older woman looking for a man to love, living in a society where older women outnumber older men on dating apps, and men in general still expect to date women younger than they are, no matter the level of their own attractiveness, these social and cultural factors are dismissed in favor of our supposed lack of self-love. 

If only it were that easy.

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