Your Relationship with Yourself is Most Important

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, you’re either single or taken—or, very much confused by a situationship. Either way, this particular holiday brings about emotions for everyone; you might feel love for your partner or your besties, you might feel lonely or you might still be confused about your current situationship.

Regardless of which scenario is most relatable to you, I’d like to remind you that Valentine’s Day isn’t simply about romantic love or friendship love—it is also about self-love. That’s right, you deserve to be loved by you too!

As humans, we tend to be quite hard on ourselves; it is almost as if you can’t help but see all the flaws but none of the strengths. It is quite frustrating! Most people don’t master self-love until they are well into their senior years, which is why you need to prioritize self-love now.

Let’s think about that again. Why is self-love important? Well, there’s so many reasons! First off, life is all around better when you like who you are as a person. Self-love also means that you are able to recognize and accept your insecurities while choosing to improve with grace for yourself.

We can also think about self-love in the context of relationships. In my personal experience, when I disliked myself the most, my relationships—with my partner, friends, and family—also suffered the most. I would almost take my flaws and insecurities and project them onto my loved ones, often leading to arguments all because I didn’t love myself first.

So, self-love is essential! How to practice self-love? To be honest, I am still figuring this out. However, I think we must first learn to recognize how no one is perfect. I find that this statement often grounds me and puts things into perspective. Truly think about it: Everyone has self-criticism! 

Then, I believe the next step is to accept: you need to be able to accept your flaws and insecurities to be able to love how they make you who you are.  You need to accept yourself to love the good and bad parts of yourself.

Finally, have grace for yourself. Recognize your flaws and work towards improving them, but when you inevitably have a difficult moment, give yourself the space and time to have that moment—give yourself grace just as you give grace to others.

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Self-love isn’t easy. In fact, it was never going to be easy. However, I hope you practice self-love for yourself this Valentine’s Day! You deserve to love yourself first.

All my best,

N