"You can't love another until you love yourself"

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I've heard versions of this phrase a few times before, and mulled over it a bit when my last relationship seemed to be stagnating somehow. I've never quite understood it, though. Is it impossible to be loved by someone if you have very low self esteem? Or does a low opinion of yourself somehow interfere with your own capacity to feel true love for another person?

If anyone agrees with the phrase, can you explain your idea of the logic behind it?

I think there's a couple of different concepts you referring to. There's the core emotional and psychological issue, and there's the resulting behavior.

The core issue is that often people with low self-esteem look to their significant other to validate their worth. For example, "If I don't have a significant other, I'm nothing." That's an extremely difficult conundrum - it's impossible for one individual to validate another individual's core value. Each individual needs their own sense of personal worth.

Then there's the resulting behavior of this flawed philosophy....there are so many different ways that a person with low self-esteem can sabotage a relationship (too many to mention), but for example: continually questioning their partner's feelings for them; acting out jealously (when no jealousy is warranted); behaving in a way that pushes their partner away, simply because they expect their partner will leave eventually; trying to control their partner; not bringing anything to the relationship....the list could go on forever.

When people use the phrase you're asking about, they're typically referring to the kind of self-handicapping behavior I've described above (and dozens of other examples). So I do think it's possible to be loved by someone if you have low self-esteem, but I think it's highly improbable that you'll be able to sustain the relationship, and allow it to grow. Does that help at all?

Low self worth, love your self? I we have aspergers mother fu<ker!’, not no NT that have an issue that prevents us from finding a relationship.

We can have all this damn self loving, self appreciative attributes but of if you don’t have a certain level of social skills, then your fvcked mother fvucker it aint got nothing to do with self worth.

And all this gibba-jabb about self handicapping, why the hell would a socially handicapped person such as one with autism or Asperger handicap themselves some more. It is like saying a physically handicapped person is lazy because he hasn’t achieved everything in a day that a physically abled person has.

It is often NTs that that have all these character weaknesses, and still find a loving relationship very easily.So they assume that a given person( with asperger) is like them, but simply has too much character weaknesses.

prolly because if you can't love yourself, then you're prolly looking for love in others for the wrong reasons.

We need to go back to basics, scientificaly. Why to people date? What would happen if all aspie become content being alone and having no children?

In my view, if a person doesn't love themselves, they then may think they don't deserve love and then may not be able to give love back for various reasons.

Guys, not everyone that is in a relationship loves themselves. Not every relationship will fail just because one person doesn't love themselves.

That is because it makes no sense, and that is because “love of self” is an inherent state ... and we are not talking about warm-n-fuzzy feelings here! Rather, “love of self” amounts to “thought of self”, and the idea is to think of and act toward others just as we do in concern of ourselves. Here is the origin and context of all of this:

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“Do not steal, do not lie, do not deceive one another ...
“Do not oppress your neighbour or rob ...
“Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind ...
“Do not be partial to the poor or favour the face of the great ...
“Do not go slandering ...
“And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
(Leviticus 19:11-18)
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Not at all. Inspired by need or desire, expressions of love begin with *action*, not feeling.



A low opinion of oneself might hinder oneself from doing anything at all, but love begins to be evident when we “get out of ourselves” and do kind and good things toward others.

Aspie_Chav, since I believe this tirade is directed at me, let me clear something up. My response was an attempt to explain the concepts behind a commonly used saying - I made no references to Aspies or NTs. Frankly, I find your language and tone offensive.

I agree that love is very much about giving, and doing kind and good things toward others. Specifically I think that having low self-esteem hinders giving because low self-esteem puts you in a position of not giving as effectively as you could if you had better self-esteem. It is harder to be so genuinely giving, when you are at the same time in desperate need of receiving.

Loving self would be great but I’d settle for just not being so self-critical. Like not beating myself up for past mistakes…

However, has not prevented me from forming relationships, just drastically limits their duration. Probably makes me not much fun to partner with.

I’m gaining more self acceptance though and optimistic about it.

I am generally disappointed with diagnosis of mental health and psychology (aspie or NT). There is so much talk about self disabling and self destructive behaviours. Those kind of behaviours that we are so readily happy to talk about are not that common, at least not as much as we like to think.

When we talk about self disabling and self destructive behaviours, we are talking about the psychological equivalent of having a resource and then chucking it away for no tangible gain, such as throwing money out of a window or letting a dog bite chunks of flesh from your body or a woman who walks in a dark ally naked an has sex with the first man that turns the corner or scratch the paintwork of your own car for kicks. But more then 99.9 of people are not like this.

Human emotions and feelings are supposed to help us survive in our environment not the opposite as I described above. This holds true in the animal kingdom also. Our emotions are not suppose to be the problem but the solution. If someone appears to show a kind of mislike of them selves, then in a given situation, that is considered a survival trait or else they wouldn’t respond this way and would behave confidently instead.

Yes being self loathing is a survival trait or else this behaviour would not have a chance to evolve into human behavior

Darwinion psychology goes some way to explain this. We must understand before we have a solution. We must also remember mother nature did not f**k up when she created us we are the most adaptive of all animal species; WE DID NOT GET THIS WAY BY EVOVLING BAHAVIORS COUNTER PRODUCTIVE TO OUR SERVIVAL.

Well, you seem to doubt that self-destructive behavior truly exists, and I disagree. A few examples of self-destructive behavior: the alcoholic who allows alcohol to destroy his/her life; the victim of abuse who returns to his/her abuser; the individual who refuses to learn from his/her mistakes and chooses instead to repeat the same bad choices and have the same bad experiences repeatedly. You're talking about generalities on a species-wide basis, so you're accepting the aggregate conclusion (that the species ultimately survives), over each individual situation that contributes to the aggregate (while most survive, some people will literally destroy themselves).

I don't think the need is so much to love yourself as it is to know and understand yourself. It's important to understand your real needs in a relationship, and how they might be answered by that person -- or better yet by yourself first.

Sometimes people enter into relationships where they really are hoping the other will provide something they should be able to provide themselves. Such as self-esteem, feeling good about how they look, being able to support themselves, and to recover from emotional issues. Some people who aren't very happy think that a relationship will somehow make them happy. (It won't.) Or they're not aware of some of their own issues that will cause problems in the relationship and that maybe the other person isn't aware of either.

Knowing yourself is important before you try to relate to another in a romantic relationship. Knowing the other as they are is also to be expected as a relationship matures -- what you see up front is frequently not what's really there in that person. How will you handle it when they reveal their true selves? How capable are you of forgiving yourself or another for being human and having faults? Loving yourself is really about facing your own faults, forgiving yourself for having them, and understanding what impact they might have on a relationship. It's also about knowing you are complete as a person, not needing another to complete you.

No that I have anything positive to add to this topic by ANY means (meaning my view on human behavior, lol)...

But keep in mind, not all things are adaptive (just because you have something doesn't make it adaptive)... Nipples in males are not adaptive... Same thing applies to mental states as well.

Also, a mutation can render a "would-be adaptive" trait to actually being non adaptive and it's not that hard to keep something being selected against in the gene pool (or genome). Yes it depends on other selection factors, but it can be quite hard to take out the genomic trash, so to speak.

Just basically... it's not as easy as saying everything has a positive adaptive reason for being there.

But again, I'm not arguing against this behavior as being adaptive.

Yes, yes, yes. Just yesterday I talked with someone about how badly I am presently hurting, mostly depression, and about how that is holding me back from some of the giving I really need to be doing. Each day I look for even the slightest of opportunities to set my own "self" aside and at least be willing to again give, when I can ...