Your capacity to love your partner is completely based on your capacity to love yourself. Sacrifice and compromise don’t help people love better — they create victim-savior dynamics that breed resentment and obligation.
People get stuck trying to love their partner better through self-denial — suppressing their needs, abandoning parts of themselves. But coming back to yourself with full acceptance is actually the way to love your partner better. If you let everything be, including all of you — everything you’re worried isn’t lovable about yourself — you make room for all of it to be loved, and for love to flow outward naturally.
“Your capacity to love your partner is completely based on your capacity to love yourself.”
Self-care is the priority in all relationship work. You can’t treat others with love and respect that you haven’t first given yourself.
Related Concepts
- Self-compassion before external success
- Welcoming is self-love
- Can’t be seen if not being yourself
- Self-love sets the capacity limit for loving a partner
- What you can’t love in your partner is what you can’t love in yourself
- You only get the love you can let in