Why "You cannot love someone until you love yourself" is the most unhelpful saying in the world.

On self-love, self-hatred and embracing being a work-in-progress.

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

The world sometimes feels like it is full of unhelpful sayings that seem well meaning but feel designed to upset us. For instance, I’ve never seen a person calm down after being told to “Relax” or “Calm down” in a situation where they are extremely upset. You can’t turn feelings on and off like that. Nor have I seen someone recover from a breakup after simply being told “There are plenty more fish in the sea”. The one that I particularly dislike with a passion though is “You cannot love someone until you love yourself.”

The first time I heard this saying was when I was having the kind of day where everything went wrong and I was truly feeling awful about myself – I had messed up an important email, I had writers block, my aunt had passed away and grief was colouring my whole world grey. I had ruined the meal I cooked, the house was a mess because I had no energy to clean it after working a gruelling 12 hour shift; I felt like a failure. When I confided these feelings of failure to a friend, they said “I don’t know how you expect anyone else to love you when you don’t love yourself.”

If I wasn’t feeling like rubbish before, I certainly felt considerably worse after hearing that.

Over the years I began to see that saying all over Instagram.

And it really was everywhere. Motivational posters, mugs, wellness websites - capitalism took this saying and just ran with it. But take a deeper look at what this saying is suggesting and you’ll see why I dislike it so much especially as a survivor of trauma and abuse: You are incapable of any kind of real love until you learn how to love yourself.

Let me be clear, I’m a big fan of the concept of self-love. I think we live in a world where we are constantly being told to hate physical parts of ourselves that we may have been fine with before – until some magazine, some tv show, someone on social media told us that actually that is something ugly, it is a flaw (Trust me when I say as a big-nosed, asymmetric faced woman living with scoliosis – there is no end to the things we are taught to hate about ourselves). Add to this living through trauma, abuse, mental illness and there is no end to the things we beat ourselves up for.

What I’m trying to say is: to unlearn self-hate and embrace self-love is a lifelong process. And this is because self-love isn’t a single destination. Some days, you think you’re there, you’ve done it, mastered the art of self-love and suddenly something happens and you hate yourself again. It feels like one step forward, two steps back, but then, whoever said anything mental health related is a linear process?