Looking for love is a quest that fuels endless drama, fills Amazon’s order queue, and funds dating service executives’ retirement accounts.

The drama plays out online, through texts and on Facebook.

Valentine’s Day drove a hornet’s nest of fury my way when I went on the NBC15 news to suggest (gasp!), most people have the quest backwards, and self-love comes first.

Valerie wrote to admonish me:  “LOVE IS ABOUT GIVING, NOT RECEIVING!” she yelled (yes, those are her caps).

“What are you going to give, if you can’t fill your own needs?” I asked.

“I understand self-love,” Adelaine wrote, “But I know I shouldn’t get too full of myself.”

“I bet the world would simply stop turning on its axis if that happened, Adelaine.“

“I have heard that concept of loving yourself first a hundred times, and it is just baloney,” Cindy told me.  “I mean, what does that mean anyway?”

Cindy, I’m writing this blog for you.  And I will tell you what it means.

Most of us believe, when someone cares for us, we will have all the love we need.   But, besides putting an impossible burden on any relationship, another person can’t give us a purpose in life, take care of our deeper needs, or give us value.  But a relationship can get in the way of discovering all those vitally important elements.

Once we are in a relationship, we tend to support the status quo, fearing change will upset the delicate balance of the pairing.

Loving another person can’t make up for any lack of self-love we may have; in fact, it may make it impossible to achieve because, while we are in a non-loving relationship with ourselves, we tend to attract partnerships which don’t endure.  It’s based on a ghost.  It’s ultimately empty.

If you don’t know yourself, your partner will always see blank spaces instead of you, or, worse, they will fill in those blanks with their own beliefs or neediness.  It’s the fast track to a dysfunctional relationship.

Our culture doesn’t exactly exhort self-love or even self-care.  Instead, we are railroaded by media, advertising and government into believing we are work machines, stressed and driven to achieve, body be damned.  Our culture has created a box for each of us:  a keep working/pay taxes/fit in/look like this/don’t cause trouble box.

So, in a society that doesn’t know self-love, and there are few places to learn it… self-love is Job #1.

Six Signs of Needing More Self-Love

1. Looking for the “OK” stamp – seeking validation constantly, from the boss, the best friend, the family (who often has none to give).
   
2. Feeling bored, vacant or empty when not in a relationship – it’s a sure sign of lack of love if you steep in loneliness when your company is right there.
   
3. Unable to maintain healthy habits – people who care about themselves make health a priority, often without much thought.
   
4. Sabotaging self – from relationships, to career goals, we often implode when getting close to what we want.
   
5. Hollow space around life’s wins – when every good feeling is followed by a whoosh! – like the sound of air leaving the balloon as the joy drains away – it’s a sign we aren’t holding onto the great things in our lives.
   
6. Desperation around relationships – this is often misunderstood – that “leaning in” or “yearning” for a relationship isn’t a yearning for another person, it’s a yearning for yourself.  Only when we don’t feel this yearning is it time to move ahead with a relationship.
   

Without self-love, we don’t feel better about ourselves when we are in a relationship, we feel worse, because we don’t accept the love coming our way.  We don’t trust it.  If the relationship is a good one, we sabotage it, and if it’s not the right relationship for us, we won’t leave.

If we don’t feel we are good enough for a relationship, we create one that’s definitely not good enough for us.

Self-love is a journey.  Forget ego.  Forget how things look.  The deep knowing of self-love creates a better environment for connection, for meaning, for resonance.

Yes, Cindy, it comes first.