The Miracle of Loving Oneself

I am a big advocate for the concept of forgetting oneself and serving others. I have learned from personal experience that I am happiest when I’m other-minded. Focusing on the happiness of others has helped me overcome depression and minimize stress. My soul resonates with the exhortation of Jesus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.

But here’s the thing about the wording of that mandate. It says one must love one’s neighbor as oneself, no more than oneself. When I noticed this, it threw me off because I’ve been such an advocate of forgetting oneself to be other-minded. But it makes sense because my experience has also taught me that I can only love others to the degree and capacity with which I love myself.

Let me illustrate how important this is by pointing out three disastrous scenarios that come about because people try to love others without loving themselves:

Exhaustion: Too many of us try to help others without taking care of ourselves and end up getting burnt out. It’s like writing checks from an account without any money in it. The checks are impotent. Similarly, the love we try to give others is impotent if it is not backed by a full account of healthy love for ourselves. We become exhausted and are less helpful to other people because we don’t have enough self to give.

Abuse: Many abusers use the principle of “forget yourself and love your partner” to guilt the other person into sticking around and suffering the abusive relationship. This manipulation works because the promotion of “selflessness” is not being tempered with the idea of loving oneself. Thus, the beautiful principle of other-mindedness is mutated into something ugly and evil that allows the abuser to selfishly hurt others.

Incompleteness: As a high school teacher, I worry that some of the teenagers I observe enter in romantic relationships to try to complete themselves and it just doesn’t work. They end up being an emotional drain on the other person (and it’s really weird when both people are emotionally draining each other). I think it is better to be happy with ourselves and have developed a secure sense of self to the point that we have something to give to a partner rather than try to use romantic relationships to complete ourselves. For a beautiful sermon on this topic, check out Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece Meets the Big O”. It’s great.

Now, I want to be really clear here that I’m not advocating for selfishness—I’m advocating for a healthy, confident love of oneself that is both a prerequisite for and a product of selflessness. And I know I just stated a contradiction. If it’s the product of selflessness, how can it also be a prerequisite for it? Does that mean we’re stuck in the plight of the young person who needs work experience to get a job but needs a job to get work experience?

Love is a transcendent principle. In fact, it is perhaps the most transcendent principle I have ever engaged with. And transcendent principles are usually rife with contradictions because they exist on a higher, spiritual plane and our intellects are limited to linear, one-thing-at-a-time processes. To a one-dimensional line, a two-dimensional circle is quite the extraordinary thing, rife with “contradictions” that defy the rules of the plane on which it exists—and imagine how both the line and the circle feel about a sphere! For us mortals existing in a one-dimensional world, so to speak, two or three-dimensional love is quite the miracle and quite the contradiction so it’s going to be hard to define and nail down at times.

But I know from experience that if we will engage with love for others and for ourselves, we will discover a completeness of love that will raise us to higher places and fill us with joy. And when we practice love for others, it will help us feel greater love for ourselves just as when we practice true love for ourselves, we’ll feel more able and willing to show love to others. If we try to love ourselves without loving others, we will probably end up in a selfish place. But, similarly, if we try to love others without loving ourselves, we’ll engage with a hollow fragment of love that will, ultimately, leave us burnt out, broken, or unsatisfied.