Advice, Dating and Relationships, God, Self Care, Self Improvement

Love Yourself First

bubblebathselfempowerment

I met someone about a year ago. Felt we had a great spiritual connection from the first date on.  He was very attentive and wore his heart on his sleeve.  We had good times. Felt like a hole in my heart had been filled.

But I overlooked red and yellow flags because of the connection I thought was so wonderful.  Half the time I was torn on what to do about it.  I’d never connected with a man spiritually and had God as the foundation.  That alone was enough to make me stay even through the red flags.  There is an in-explainable feeling when you feel God is the foundation of a relationship – I’d never had it before and will now never accept anything less.  It gives depth to the relationship and feels like God will get the two of you through anything.

But then there were the red flags.  I began to ask myself why God would put me with someone that needed a lot of self-healing.  Probably because I also needed self-healing.  Both of us needed self-love in different ways.  For me it was to love myself enough to walk away from someone that does not know how to love himself enough to take care of himself mentally and physically, and to know that if he cannot love himself, he cannot love me.

It took me a long time to understand this and I spent a lot of my time struggling with what to do.  In hindsight, I wish I would have understood better in the beginning so I could have spent my energy more on my dreams and goals.  Don’t get me wrong, I still worked at that, but if my head was focused more on that, I’d be in a better place now.

Love is the most powerful thing.  Maybe it wasn’t true love since I wasn’t loving myself and he wasn’t loving himself (even though I felt like it was on my end).  I don’t know – love is confusing to me.  What is romantic love? (please comment below!).  I definitely know mother-child and child-parent love, which is unconditional. Maybe it’s the same in romantic love, but sometimes you have to love someone from a distance because you have to love yourself first.  I’m still trying to understand this at 53 years old.

I learned a lot though.  A big one is energy.  A lot of my energy went to this – it was my focus to make it work and everything else went on auto-pilot.  I didn’t have energy for inspiration and creativity and if I had, where would I be now?  Probably in a much better place.

I am not regretting anything since it taught me a valuable lesson and I had many wonderful loving experiences from it; experiences that I’d never experienced.  But it did put me in a position of struggling financially and heartbreak and if I had to do it over again knowing what I know now, I’d choose to focus on my goals and ambitions.  Who knows?  Maybe that would have been the catalyst for his change and things may have worked out eventually.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Please feel free to comment below.

~ Monica

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Self-Love: What Is it, and How Can I Get It?

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Published by bubblebathselfempowerment

The pandemic brought a lot of awareness to me about climate change, food shortages, how quickly our hospitals could colapse and more. This has sent me on a mission of becoming self-sustainable, empowered and working to help heal the earth. That is what the focus of this blog has become. The main way I'm working at this is through building a food forest and documenting as much as possible in hopes to inspire others. The more of us that do this, the more it will help heal the earth. When we buy produce from the grocery store, it was grown through monoculture, and that leads to use of chemicals that goes onto our food and into our planet, destroying soil. If we grow our own through permaculture (a food forest), we give the soil health. We also give ourselves health by growing organic foods and herbs that contribute to our health. There's a lot more to this, but this touches the surface. I'm only one year into this but my food forest is growing. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

27 thoughts on “Love Yourself First”

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  6. Thank you for being strong enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable 🖤 as for what love is, I’ll make it simple and easy. A lover is also a best friend. Therefore, a lover should have the same qualities as a best friend – loyalty, respect, affection, communication and understanding. The difference is that love is more intimate (emotionally and physically). When you lose the “friendship” in a relationship, it becomes bland. It becomes difficult to tell the other person how you feel and the joy of spending time together diminishes. That’s how the spark dies…

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    1. I totally agree that friendship is needed in an intimate relationship. In my situation, we still had the friendship, but the trust was obliterated because he didn’t respect me. Integrity is now the biggest thing I look for because if someone has integrity they are probably loyal, respectful, kind, consistent and stable. Thank-you for commenting!

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  11. I think there are times when you get too caught up and you feel so emotionally fuelled that you turn the red flags into something positive. Our judgement becomes clouded due to emotion. We give out so many reasons why things happened and we do try our hardest to make things work.

    But later on when the smoke finally clears up, then and there do we realise that the red flags were real and we were too blinded to see them.

    Great post! I enjoyed it very much:)

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  14. Romantic love seems to run its course of passion. but unlike an unconditional love parent/child no matter what remains. There is no sex and sometime we do not even feel connected to the parent or our own child. Yet, we want the best for them and will do what we can to see them get the best. Why then is romantic love washed away, it is conditional and tied into fleeting feelings. We spend more time outside of the bed than we do engage in no matter how hot the sex.
    I’m still learning and it is still a mystery. For Now, love is about not who I can’t live with, but about who I can. thanks for tackling such a hot topic and sharing your experience!

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    1. Romantic love IS perplexing, isn’t it? I’d love to be able to understand unconditional love in a romantic love. But how can I love him unconditionally if he’s at the bar fooling around with another woman, for example? Lately I’ve been trying to understand this and the only thing I can think of is to try to understand the underlying reasons why someone would do such a thing. A lot of times it’s because they’ve been hurt in the past and they do things to sabotage any new love that comes in. But I could never stay with someone that does that so I guess I’d have to love him unconditionally from a distance. It’s mind boggling and unrelatable to parent/child unconditional love. I hope someday to have a better understanding.

      Thank-you for sharing your wise thoughts. It’s good to have someone to relate to about this. Have a great day!

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      1. You are most welcome! appreciate your engagement. Love from a distance is the way to go, when one does not know how to respect the love that is offered. Not putting up with cheating! Have a wonderful week! I shall see you around…

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