With myself.

I know that sounds narcissistic, but it isn’t really. Oh and this entry is not about masturbation, but about self-love. While there is nothing wrong with the former, I want to focus on a topic that the majority neglects — how to truly love ourselves.

We have been taught that to fall in love, real love, with someone else is the holy grail of emotional connections. We see it in movies, hear it on the radio, and have read it in literature throughout the years. When we find it we hold it out for all to see and envy.

We celebrate it with marriage and anniversaries, we hunt for it in bars, jobs, churches and on dating sites. Yet, the majority of us don’t find it. Instead, we settle for some other type of attraction that fades with time.

Then, the broken hearted lament “never again” and try to figure out what went wrong. But! Maybe our trouble starts long before our first date. Maybe it exists in that old dichotomy between our being taught to love others but never ourselves.

Long about the same time we are learning of love’s holy grail our self-esteem takes a beating when love directed inward is admonished as conceit, prideful, boastful, narcissistic and selfish.

REALLY?

How are we supposed to give everything we have to someone else when we don’t believe it’s worth having in the first place?

A friend of mine recently recited this quote as a pearl of wisdom:

Never fall in love with anyone you wouldn’t want to be.”

Sounds like good advice yet a question arose in my head.

What’s wrong with just being me?

And if that’s ok, then why would I be searching for someone else to be like?

This brought me to the conclusion that we need to do a lot of self-loving. But, how do we start?

How do I learn to fall in love with the only one who was guaranteed to have come into this world with me; stick with me throughout this journey; and no matter how happy or successful will be there when I die? See there’s another saying:

“We all die alone.

No matter who is at your side in that final moment, you still must take that next step alone. So shouldn’t we be training ourselves to really like ourselves?

By that I don’t mean the deluded, self-absorbed emotion that masks great insecurity and self-loathing. I never want to be one of those insecure Neanderthals who puff out their chests and shout “Do you know who I am?!? when they don’t get their way.

I also don’t want to measure my life’s worth by how much money I have stowed away or how many shiny baubles I own.

In the journey my soul is preparing for I want to take a suitcase full of something much more valuable and useful to me. I’ve seen things passed down by inheritance to those who don’t care about their history or how hard someone had to work to get it.

Do you want to spend your time amassing things that won’t hold your interest for very long? Or, maybe jumping from one relationship to another yet never really feeling connected to anyone or anything?

Me neither.

So to end this wordy entry, I’m going to spend at least one hour a day first getting to know and then falling in love with the one person I should love (first)–myself.

One hour a day is very little to give for a life time or more of love.