The Love of Another Person Is Meant to Compliment Us, Not to Complete Us

I was raised by a mother who married my father to "complete" herself. She thought of marriage as a partnership where two halves became a whole. She knew my father wasn't the perfect half to complete her, but she believed she could love (or actually manipulate) him enough to make her feel happy and complete.

Growing up-- and even to this day-- I can't begin to count the number of married people who introduced their spouses to me as "my better half." Most of these married people have been Baby-Boomers or older. I don't hear that cliched phrase as much from Generation X or Millennials, but that doesn't mean that the same subconscious belief isn't still present.

There are plenty of younger people today who still feel empty inside and who think that some other person, in particular a lover or lifetime partner, is waiting in the wings to sweep them off their feet and fill-up their empty love tank-- perpetually.

Unfortunately, this never is possible. Those of us who suffer from the emptiness of codependency have a large hole in our love tanks. And there's no other person on earth who can fill our tank to perfectly satisfy us. A tank with a hole in it will always end up empty, no matter how much outside love is poured into it. The hole in the love tank is simply a missing piece of the tank, and that missing piece is us.

We are the ones who have to stop abandoning ourselves, stop loathing ourselves and stop believing that it's someone else's job to fix us and make us lovable. Only we can fix us. We have to start showing up for ourselves. We have to be the sealant that patches the hole in our love tank. Then we have to begin the practice of loving ourselves well, along with the assistance of our Higher Power.

Once we reach a point of authentic self-acceptance and self-love, we will begin to attract people into our lives who can compliment our happiness-- the happiness that we have attained through self-love and self-acceptance. And eventually, many of us will meet that special person who will become a lifetime partner. They will never be a lifetime partner who completes us because we are already complete. And we will never complete them, because they will already be complete. But we will compliment each other in many ways, and we will especially compliment the happiness that each of us already naturally possesses through mutual self-love and self-acceptance.