"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance”

The other day I wrote an unpublished post on self-love, inspired by a blogger (adhisha’s) recent post on love and the like. The message I deciphered from that post amounts to the idea that we all must love ourselves in the first place before trying our hands on being the apple of somebody else’s eye. Reason though is very plausible. It voices out the fact that those who cannot love thy self cannot possibly be capable of giving love to others. And I have nothing to disagree here. Although I must cleanly confess that even after spending a good twenty years of my life in the sheer company of my body and my soul, I haven’t really drawn closer enough to be friends with myself, let alone the idea of loving myself! And this certainly is a quirk of fate, very demeaning I must say. But well I have a valid argument which proclaims how awfully hard it is to love yourself considering you are well-aware of “all” your shortcomings and transgressions which disgust you every time you make an effort to step ahead and give yourself a try. And then no matter how much you resist, the counter argument does pop up in your head, making you realize that nobody ever said it’s going to be all beer and skittles every time. Love, after all, is not a synonym for perfection.

Today I just happened to bump into this another blog where I read the writer’s painful account of coming face to face with the underlying truth in Oscar Wilde's assertion that perhaps the only lifelong romance is 'to love oneself', and once again I couldn’t agree more. The truth is that all our lives--in the name of love, we try to seek comfort in other people. Our whole life starts to revolve around that one person and nothing else seems to matter to us. Not even our own selves! Everything we do then is an attempt to please our beloved and we go as off limit as mortgaging our souls to make things work out. Bear with me if you think I may be generalizing too much here, but the point is, do we still find the comfort we were looking for in the first place? Selling ourselves (as some of us would do by being vulnerable and compromising on things which cannot be compromised) to gain love can never bring any sort of comfort; in fact we fall even deeper in the abyss and then on a later date when we realize that the comfort we had been running after—seeking in some other human body is not to be found there, and that’s when things start to fall apart. Bonds crack, yet we still do not understand what went wrong. We put the blame on who-so-ever and after we are over the ‘getting over’ phase, we once again venture out searching a dwelling in another heart which shows potential to provide comfort that we long for.

After life long experiments, it all comes down to this little fact that the most delightful and satisfying of comforts made available to human beings lies not in other people’s liking of us, but in our liking of ourselves. Because the truth is that only one form of love can lead us to the next! And only after loving ourselves can we find that famous version of being loved that is known to bring comfort to the human soul.