Self-Love, Self-Protection, Self-preservation – how your relationship with yourself impacts your relationship with others.

Entering a relationship without first holding love for yourself is like going to space without bringing your own helmet – hoping that your partner's helmet will hold your head too – and then you’ll be able to breathe. 

What is self-love? 

The act of breathing itself is an act of self-love because making a mistake, letting someone down or feeling worried about yourself can turn your breaths into bullet fire… but the choice to patiently regulate them; inhale, exhale and listen to your feelings is an action that may better define self-love as a practise than a sentence of steps and guides ever could. 

The importance of self-love

Self-love should be as self-conscious as breathing, but in reality, even breathing can force you to step in sometimes. The choice between critiquing or meditating yourself becomes crucial; a form of self-protection.
Self-love becomes self-protection not only during a panic attack but also during the passion and panic of relationships. 

Practising self-love isn’t only about building up your esteem, it’s about fortifying your relationships with other people too. 

The danger of self-preservation

However, like breathing, a balance and rhythm is still integral and self-protection taken too far can become a sense of self-preservation that blocks off any vulnerability and teaches a partner to love you in the wrong way.

But, just because you have a helmet of your own, doesn’t mean it should be one that’s impenetrable and hides the real you. 

What does self-love protect you from? 

If you deprive yourself of love, then you settle for anyone that shows you the slightest signs of it and this can lead to harmful relationships, even re-shaping the way you view yourself. If you’re going into a relationship with low self esteem, then there’s the danger that your partner may not be the right one for you – their opinions about you can become internalised as true reflections of yourself – because you haven't given yourself enough time nor respect in the first place to make your own conclusions, so you take a partner’s view of you as being the truth.

It can also be much harder to enforce boundaries, to say “no”. When you don’t treat yourself with love, the worry of someone leaving you is so strong that you can overlook any of their bad habits just as long as you don’t have to be alone. Setting boundaries is a healthy part of all relationships as it allows partners to understand what you are and aren't comfortable with, gifting both a greater understanding. But having a lack of self-love can make you neglect your own needs. 

Finally, you can feel the constant need to perform – to critique, to overthink and to overstress about always being someone that you’re not because you believe the real you might never be enough. This can negatively impact your mental wellbeing everyday, making time spent with a partner a performance, and time without them a strange, confusing space of not even knowing who you are. 

Can self-protection become dangerous? 

So, taking the time to understand who you are, choose partners that you deserve, know your boundaries and being yourself will all help to protect your self-esteem and yourself from unhealthy relationships; it is important to focus on yourself. 

However, there is also an ever increasing issue of people who will only rely on self-love and rather steer clear of love from others because of the risk which loving someone else brings – that they could stop… and you could be hurt, detrimentally hurt.
Sometimes it can be easier to understand everything about yourself. The idea of trying to express who you are to someone else can feel overwhelming. But when you rely on only yourself, you limit yourself and the value of who you are or could become. 

Self-love isn’t only about loving yourself, it’s knowing that you deserve to be loved by someone who understands you too. Even in relationships, people can see all around them the statistics of divorce, they can love someone but not ever express it; playing games with texting and not opening up because then they can preserve themselves …but this makes the other partner oftentimes treat you the same way, learning to love an altered version of you.
Self-preservation can cause stagnation and loneliness – and that is dangerous. 

So how do we practise this balance? 

Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done, and isn’t just as simple as a quick fix. 

The balance is: between having a strong foundation of yourself and not letting your worth be dependent on other people …while also not binding yourself up too much, depriving growth and love from others in fear of getting hurt.

Self-love becomes self protection not by guarding up your vulnerability but by celebrating it; its strangeness, its pain, its beauty and the decision to trust yourself along each and every tumultuous turn. 

Written by Ben Lynch (@Ben_Lynch__)

Edited by Alex Kelleher (@alex_kelleher_)