The Most Important Ingredient to Happy Relationships

Self Love! Image Credit

This post by Laura today is spot on! The reason I haven’t been posting as often is that I am taking time for myself! Time to love myself! Words of wisdom in this post. Take it away…..

Relationships are a lot like recipes, in that there is a recipe for relationship success and there’s a recipe for relationship misery.

Of course, you need to use quality ingredients in order to create a beautiful cake, as if you use rotten ingredients then the end result isn’t going to taste nice, and if you miss an essential ingredient, the cake simply won’t rise.

In this article we’re going to look at the most important ingredient to happy relationships, and also, one of the most overlooked; that is the ingredient of “self love”.

There’s plenty of memes and relationship books that all state the same thing – to be loved by someone else, you first have to love yourself and develop a good relationship with yourself; whilst this sounds somewhat trite it is true.

If you’ve been on an airplane before you’ll be familiar with the safety announcement that states “before helping anyone else with their oxygen mask you must first secure your own mask – especially before helping children”.  Now, whilst this might go against the grain of the parental instinct, it is a wise lesson that we can apply to other areas of our life.

See, unless you first look after yourself, you can’t take care of anyone else, and in a relationship we often focus on loving the other person more than we focus on loving ourselves.  This can be a recipe for disaster, as we all know those people trapped in a relationship they are trying to escape, only to find themselves in the same relationship with a different person, time and time again.

It’s as if they are trapped in an escape room, unable to find the door that leads them out of this cycle – instead, just going around the same corridor time and time again.

See, the only way you can make your relationships change for the good, is if you work on changing yourself for the good – and the best way to do that, in this context, is to start tending to your own needs and loving yourself.

SELF LOVE

Louise Hay, one of the world’s leading experts in the area of self-love suggests:

“Self love is a deep appreciation. When I talk about loving ourselves, I mean having a deep appreciation for who we are. We accept all the different parts of ourselves—our little peculiarities, the embarrassments, the things we may not do so well, and all the wonderful qualities, too.”

Louise goes on to explain that, many of us make self-love conditional in that we say we will love ourselves WHEN we lose weight or have more money or get a better job… meaning, it’s constantly being put off until some external condition is satisfied.  Yet, this keeps us in a cycle of unhappiness, as the proverbial carrot is always kept just out of reach.

Self love is an unconditional sense of love and acceptance for who you are.  It’s a sense of emotional security that allows you to perceive yourself as good enough, exactly as you are, and when you start to feel this way about yourself – you become less dependent on a partner to make you feel this way, in turn taking the pressure and demand of the relationship, meaning you and your partner are much more free to laugh, connect, have fun and be intimate.

In a sentence, you will never feel fully loved until you start loving yourself – so focus on putting your own gas mask on first and start taking care of yourself, so that then you can properly take care of others.