by Elaine Sihera

Created on: November 25, 2008

Can we ever teach anyone to love us the way we want to be loved? Perhaps not because true love does not come from others first. It comes from ourselves as the foundation. The the saddest part of being with someone is gradually growing tired of waiting to be appreciated and loved, in the way we feel we deserve because the other person simply does not know how to love us. Relationships fail precisely because people go into them expecting to change the other person by teaching them things. But everything we learn from a partner isn't deliberately taught. It comes through natural interaction. Thus, if that man/woman isn't loving us the way we want, while that might be sad, the only thing is to find someone else who does, not try to change them.

Often people don't feel loved, or can't find 'true love' because they do not know the first law of loving: TO LOVE ONESELF. They expect others to compensate for the lack of self love. But when we lack self love we can neither give love, receive love or find love. We would always be suspicious of the person who loves us or we would not know how to return that love. Like money, we cannot give away what we haven't got. Instead people expect others to love them to make up for the absence of self love and when that doesn't happen, there is unhappiness all round.

True love begins inside us. When we love ourself, appreciate ourself and value ourself we will slowly realise that a lover is the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. We ARE the cake! We do not need them to love us. We do not need to teach them how to love us either. By the love we give them, and the value we place on them, they will either return that love tenfold, because it matches their needs, or resist it because it is too overwhelming (they have no self love too!) and they can't deal with it.

Self love means we can take someone or leave them; we don't seek to change them; we appreciate who they are, what they wish to be and how they treat us; we do not just find fault with them constantly and we do not have too many unrealistic expectations of them either. We value them exactly as they are. Appreciating ourselves means that we can appreciate others too for what they wish to be, not what we want them to be. A person is the best simply when they are being themself and feel comfortable doing it. If that does not match with what we hope to have, we are definitely with the wrong person.

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