You Don't Have to Love Yourself Before You Can Love Someone Else
Yes, if you hate yourself and you’re living a reckless life, you probably should work on you a little (life coping tools) before investing in someone else. But the idea that you have to fully love yourself before loving someone else is not true. It’s a banner hung by people who have read too many self-help books. It can be a wall we hide behind because we’re afraid to love.
It’s also lined with shame. It sets you up to ring a high bell that’s unattainable, because loving yourself doesn’t come with a certificate or a finish line. It’s a life-long process. It’s not a class. It’s a concept.
Like any relationship, your relationship with yourself goes up and down and sideways, and requires a daily feed. It changes as you change, as your circumstances change, and as the people around you change.
So, no matter how much work you’ve done on yourself or how far you’ve come in life, there are days you’re not going to love yourself, because of so many other factors. You may be kinder to yourself. You may no longer hate yourself. But we all snap back at times. We all live with our demons to a certain extent, because we all have our stories. And our stories have caused imprints and false beliefs. None of us enter adulthood unscarred.
That banner injects people with fear, and they begin to dig moats instead of building bridges.
So it’s actually not about loving yourself. Let’s move away from the pressure of that, especially when it comes to qualifying yourself to love someone else.
Instead, see loving yourself as the action of self-love and self-care in your everyday life and your everyday choices — from what you decide to eat, to who you decide to love and surround yourself with. Loving yourself is the practice of self-love, and it’s ongoing. Forever. Until you die. It’s not a bar to measure yourself before getting into a relationship.
Entering a relationship should not require you to be a certain person or at a certain place in your life.
What’s more important when it comes to investing in a relationship is that you like yourself. That’s more of the constant. That’s the island to swim to. That’s real. That’s secondary change.
When you get to a place where you like yourself, the action of loving yourself will come more naturally. You’ll have non-negotiables. You won’t tolerate certain behavior from others. You’ll seek less approval. Your friendships will be less lopsided. You won’t have as many holes to fill within you. You’ll be more gentle with yourself, more forgiving. You’ll believe you deserve more, better, different. You’ll finally stop breaking the promises you’ve made with you. And the relationship you have with yourself will improve.
Still not convinced?
Okay, here’s the other reason why “You have to love yourself before you love someone else” is a bumper sticker.
We love ourselves through others.
The way we learn to love ourselves is through other people and the relationships we have with them. We are literally designed to learn, grow, and love through other people. We are tribal creatures. We're not meant to do life alone.
I understand the importance of The Hero’s Journey. It's the solo quest, especially after your relationship has expired and you need to do some soul searching. But that is temporary. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s not meant to be.
Eventually, you choose to love someone new and bring what you’ve learned about yourself, love, and the world into the relationship. This relationship, assuming it’s healthy, creates the space for you to love yourself exponentially more because you are actually experiencing someone loving you.
Someone else loving you will always be more powerful than you loving yourself. It's easier to love someone else than ourselves, no matter how much work we’ve done on us. Think about it. The love you have for your children. Your husband, wife, brother, sister, friends. You would do so much more for them than yourself, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself. It means you’re human. And that’s what makes us magical.
When we experience healthy love back — someone treating us like we have value, without conditions and judgment — we learn to treat ourselves that way. The relationship lays the tracks.
On the contrary, when we are in unhealthy, toxic relationships where we are controlled and not allowed to be ourselves, we learn to turn the gun to ourselves and not love ourselves.
That’s why it’s so important to be in a healthy relationship. The relationship itself becomes a self-love machine.
So you don’t have to love yourself to love someone else. But you should like yourself, because when you like yourself, you will make healthy choices and create a space (build a relationship) that will promote self love.
This hits hard. The idea that we ‘love ourselves through others’ isn’t just poetic—it’s reality. We’re relational beings, and no amount of self-help mantras will change that. The healthiest relationships I’ve had didn’t just reflect my self-worth; they helped build it. The love I received reshaped the way I saw myself.
And the opposite is just as true—relationships that drained me, that made me question my value, left deeper scars than any internal self-doubt ever could.
So yeah, you don’t need to cross some mythical self-love finish line before loving or being loved. But you do need to like yourself enough to choose relationships that reinforce your worth, not erode it.
This deserves a wider audience—because if we understood this better, we’d stop using ‘self-love’ as a wall and start using love itself as the bridge.
I used to believe this too. I used to say it all the time because it was everywhere—on bumper stickers, in self-help books, echoed back at me whenever I questioned my worthiness in relationships. “If you don’t love yourself, you don’t love anyone.” It was drilled in so deep, I started wondering if I was somehow failing at life because I hadn’t reached some mythical finish line of self-love.
But the more I lived, the more I realized how untrue that is. And you put into words something I’ve been trying to articulate for so long:
We don’t love ourselves in a vacuum. We love ourselves through others.
This part hit me the hardest: “Someone else loving you will always be more powerful than you loving yourself.” Because it’s true! It’s why the love of a parent shapes a child’s confidence. It’s why being in a healthy relationship rewires years of self-doubt. It’s why we rise to meet the belief that someone else has in us.
I’ve seen it firsthand. The more someone loves me, the more I believe I’m lovable. And the more I believe I’m lovable, the more I rise to meet that love.
And that’s what people don’t talk about enough—how relationships are not just places where love is given, but where self-love is built.
So no, you don’t have to fully love yourself before you love someone else. Because self-love isn’t a destination, a certificate, or a checklist. It’s a relationship—one that is shaped by every connection we have.
But what does matter? Like you said, “That you like yourself.” That you make choices from a place of worthiness, not desperation. That you build or enter relationships that strengthen you rather than diminish you. Because when you do, self-love naturally follows.
This deserves to be plastered everywhere. Because if more people understood this, we’d have less fear, fewer walls, and a lot more love.