You have to love yourself first...

I have come to learn over the past few years the great importance of loving yourself. No I'm not talking about being narcissistic; I'm talking about accepting yourself for who you are and being proud of it.

If you haven't caught the point I'm trying to make is that before you can truly be happy you have to first look inside yourself and own up to who you are. All too often I see people jumping through hoops to be someone they're not just so that they will be loved, but in the end it always turns out the same...They end up unhappy, and alone because they have become completely fake.

I have experienced this myself first hand with my first relationship. I bent over backwards to be something I wasn't to earn the love of someone that I was afraid wouldn't like me for who I was. At the time I just told myself that relationships take work, but what I didn't realize is that the work it takes to build and maintain a healthy relationship is a completely different kind of work. Once I started to become more comfortable and show who I was and stop trying to be someone I wasn't is when things started to go south. It was inevitable now that I look back, which is why I have absolutely no regrets about it, and in-fact I'm glad it happened because I have taken a lot of valuable life lessons from it. If I had been myself the entire time then all of the stress and heartbreak might have been avoided.

It is important to realize that you should never become something you're to impress someone; however, the conflict comes up when you feel you need to change yourself to impress someone, and that change is beneficial. For instance, what if you had to come out to your family because someone you liked wouldn't date you otherwise? What if you suddenly changed your political party affiliation to try and impress someone? These things are not always bad; in and of themselves they can be positive life changes, but are they for the wrong reasons?

This also begs the question that if there is something about someone you don't like should you expect them to change just for you? Suggesting that someone quit smoking, come out to their parents, or join a different church are ok, but holding a relationship over their heads is another thing entirely.

So I suppose the point of this story is to say you really have to accept yourself for who you are before you can have a successful relationship. If you have to become someone completely different just so someone will like you then what's the point? My philosophy is that I'm happy with who I am and who I am becoming. There are a lot of things about myself I want to change (quit biting my fingernails, exercise more, be closer to my family, come out to my family, etc), but I'm going to do them for me and not for anyone else. In the end making myself happy is the highest priority and I will never get there unless I can love myself first. If I ever meet someone that does not like me for who I am, no matter how attractive I think they are, I will still not bother to be something I'm not for them. There are always going to be those people that don't agree with how you are, BUT there will always be those people that love you for who you are. Why would anyone risk the friendships they have by becoming someone totally different just to make a new friend or start a relationship? One thing is for sure, I sure won't.