If You Want to Have a Good Relationship with Others, Start by Having a Good Relationship with Yourself

“To love one’s self is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband

Love of self is essential to everyone’s well being. Yet few of us are taught, as children, to love who we are, and so we find it difficult to build good relationships with ourselves. Ideally, from the time we are small, we ought to be focused on knowing and growing into who we uniquely are and understanding how we uniquely fit into this world.

Our first concern ought to be on befriending and having a good relationship with us—on building a lifelong romance with ourselves. Children need to know that it’s OK to spend time alone exploring who they are and being comfortable with who they are before they explore their relationship to the rest of the world.

This is important because we can’t build a good relationship with others or the world around us if we haven’t first built a good relationship with ourselves. If I don’t like me, how am I going to build good relationships with others? How am I going to convince them that the “me” I find so unlikable is worth their taking the time to get to know? And how will I ever believe that they truly like me if I don’t really know or like me?

The answer to these questions brings us back to the simple conclusion that we must first build good relationships with ourselves. For many of us this is a foreign concept. We were taught to focus our attention outside of ourselves. We were taught to look outside ourselves for love and relationship instead of looking inside. Inadvertently, this made us victims of the world around us. We became dependent upon getting all of our approval and affirmation from outside of us instead of from within us. We focused on getting from others the things we needed to give to ourselves. And our relationships with others became ways of filling up the inner-neediness we never learned to address.

No one can fill up our neediness, or be responsible for our needs, except for us. If we’ve never taken the time to befriend ourselves, then we need to set aside the time to do so. We need to learn to be alone with ourselves and to be comfortable with it. We can do this by making dates with ourselves. After all, if we can successfully date ourselves, we ought to be able to successfully date others. We can spend an afternoon having coffee at a Starbucks and reading. We can journal about what we are feelings, take time to write down the things we love in life, about life and about ourselves. We can acknowledge the good within us, compliment ourselves and accept our compliments graciously. This will then help us to accept the compliments of others graciously—something we aren’t usually good about doing.

Our happiness is never dependent upon our relationships with others. It’s dependent upon our relationship with ourselves. Once we love who we are, we will be happy and our relationships with others will then compliment the happiness we already possess in and of ourselves. Take time today and everyday to build a good relationship with you—a lifelong romance—and allow your soul to shine!