I have learned the most about society through being married. Marriage was sanctifying for me, in the religious sense. I was finally able to be a good Christian because I was finally in this sacred dynamic and able to play out the highly esteemed role of a godly wife (and because I wasn’t sinning anymore.)

I had been trained on being a godly wife all through college and it was my time to shine, and that I did. I was ready to be submissive and to serve my husband selflessly. I knew we had to “put God first,” which I thought meant praying together, going to church, and trying to please God in how we dealt with conflict.

Anyway, I did that and loved it, but then life became more complex as our careers took unexpected turns. My new needs weren’t being met as I had started a taxing job, and my old needs weren’t met either.

Codependency

So I started doing this thing called being codependent. I started pushing myself to meet my husband’s needs so that he could meet mine. It went from routine house cleaning to offering to host a fantasy football party for him and his friends so that he would be inclined to love me back in an equal way.

This has continued and peaked and waned. While I wasn’t always a codependent wife, I have always been a codependent person so it wasn’t hard to dial these behaviors up, and practicing them every day created a real problem.

All that to say, I got so deep into this pattern that I began to realize, that even though I did almost everything I could for my husband, I was really doing it for me. I wanted the person I loved to love me back, so I loved him harder and harder, for my ultimate benefit. It never worked. I was constantly asking for more and more and what I received was never adequate.

Self-Love?

One day in marriage counseling, the therapist asked, “Do you love yourself?” and I was surprised to struggle to answer that question. I assumed I loved myself but being asked made me question if loving oneself was more complex than I may have imagined.

I set out to conceptualize self-love. Ultimately, I learned I did not love myself. I loved my talents, how I could make people feel, my appearance, but I didn’t love my actual self.

When it came down to it, much of my suffering happened because I couldn’t get the people I loved to love me for me, instead of loving myself. Well, no one can give you self-love. It has to come from the self. Only the self can provide love so consistently and critically as to preserve one’s livelihood.

One has to love themselves to properly care for the body and mind, to protect the self from being diminished or destroyed, to watch for its own best interests. These are day-to-day, minute-to-minute functions that require an impetus of self-love to be carried out.

When we don’t love ourselves, we are ultimately unsatisfied with the person we have selected to love us because we are unconsciously looking for them to perform all these intimate functions for us that cannot be performed externally. We still feel neglected, unsatisfied, uncared for…because we aren’t doing that for ourselves.

True Love

Yes, we need to know how we want to be to ask anyone else to do that–which is what people typically say is the reason you have to love yourself first–but we have to love ourselves to make achievable requests of the people we choose to love us. Otherwise, we will remain unsatisfied in relationships because no one can ever do for you what you are meant to do for yourself.

When I married my husband, I didn’t love myself. I hadn’t begun to unpack the messed up programming, neglect, and heartbreak I had experienced. I was focused on my discipline, intellect, financial position, and caring heart to make me believe I deserved good things.

If I had loved myself, I wouldn’t have felt so desperate when my husband couldn’t love me deeper, better. I might have been okay. I might have even been able to give him what he needed, not just what I wanted from him. Not just so I could get something from him, which feels false in some ways. But I would have been loving him truly for him. True love begins with self-love.