Self Love
Is the “Ultimate” Love Enough?
Being deeply loved by someone
gives you strength,
while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~ By Lao Tzu ~
I was on my typically contemplative daily walk the other day when once
again I found myself reviewing the current state of my 47-year-old life.
I wasn’t unhappy exactly I just felt a little lonely and somewhat
lost. My nearly 20-year-old was about to start a new life in her own apartment
and a long term romantic relationship had recently ended. I felt proud
that I had I been taking such good care of myself during the adjustment
period. I’d become involved in a variety of new or renewed creative
passions, furthered my commitment to physical exercise by learning yoga
and tennis and I was involved in a spiritual community. Still, I was unable
to ignore an undefined longing or emptiness that persisted deep within.
I felt a very important element of my life was missing.
My three month membership to an online dating service had just expired.
I signed up with the hope that meeting new people would ultimately lead
me to that special someone who might fill the void. I met nearly 30 men
during those 90 days. Alas, even though I was meeting an average of one
man every three days there weren’t any mutual matches. So here I
am, I thought, still loveless, still alone, but not completely I love
myself.
I thought about my newfound commitment to writing since my recent break-up
and becoming an empty nester and considered the real possibility of living
a full and complete life without a partner. I’d had four serious
relationships including my marriages in my lifetime and part of me had
a genuine “been there done that” attitude about romance. I
reminded myself that I am very independent and truly enjoy a lot of solitude
so perhaps I can live quite nicely without a mate to share it with.
In the book “Self-Love” by Dr. Robert Schuller (copyright
Berkley Press New York, NY 1969) Shuller says that self-love is the ultimate
will of man. He writes “that what you really want more than anything
else in the world is the awareness that you are a worthy person. It is
the deepest of all the currents which drive man onward, forward and upward.
All other drives, pleasure, love, power, meaning, creativity are symptoms
or attempts to fulfill that primal need for personal dignity.”
I was frustrated by the various self-help books that insist that you have
to love yourself, before anyone else can love you. I do love myself very
much and like my own company. I enjoy spending hours on end with myself,
being creative, reading, walking, meditation, doing yoga, hitting the
tennis ball against a wall, or just doing nothing. I also have several
close friends I enjoy spending time with. Still, I continue to crave a
romantic partner who adores me and who I cherish in kind. I couldn’t
help but feel that something must be lacking in the quality of my self-love
if it’s not filling me up. Do I not love myself as much as I think
I do? What is the problem?
What does it matter if someone else wants me or not when I am so full
of self-love? The truth for me is it does matter and it matters a lot.
To love myself without someone else to love and be loved in return is
like surviving on hamburgers, canned peas and frozen potatoes. It’s
adequate and I’ll stay alive but it would be much more enjoyable
and satisfying to dine on filet mignon, fresh baked potatoes and fresh
vegetables I can love myself until the cows come home but it won’t
ever fill the gap of receiving that special love from another and my giving
love to another special person.
Dr Helen Fisher - author and presenter of the BBC World Service Love series
-
has studied the nature of love extensively. Fisher says “Like the
craving for food, romantic love is a powerful physiological need, an urge,
a motivation, an instinct that evolved specifically to enable men and
women to court and win a preferred mating partner”. It is also possible,
Fisher noted “That almost all types of human love – from love
of God to maternal love to brotherly love to all the other subtle varieties
of human love – are variations of these three basic brain systems,
mixing in myriad ways with one another and with other brain networks”.
Focusing on romantic love, an anthropologist, Dr. Fisher establishes that
“People everywhere, from the ancient Sumerians and Chinese to contemporary
Tanzanians, Eskimos and Arabs express the same mental and physical traits
when madly in love”.
She concludes that romantic love is a universal experience – deeply
embedded in the human brain”.
I knew it! I could feel that my desire to partner was somehow out of my
control. It’s as though I have no way of stopping this craving for
romantic love even when my self-love is overflowing.
Recent research suggests that romantic attraction is in fact a primitive,
biologically based drive, like hunger or sex, some scientist’s argue,
(Benedict Carey, L.A. Times, December 2002.) Carey says by using magnetic
resonance imaging, or MRI, machines to peer into the brains of college
students in the throes of early love, scientists have development some
of the first direct evidence that the neural mechanisms of romantic attraction
are distinct from those of sexual attraction and arousal. “What
we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus
on one person to the exclusion of all others,” said Helen Fisher
an anthropologist at Rutger’s University in New Jersey.
Once in awhile,
Right in the middle of an ordinary life,
Love gives us a fairy tale.
~ By Anonymous ~
According to Abraham Maslow, there are general types of needs (physiological,
safety, love, and esteem) that must be satisfied before a person can act
unselfishly. He called these needs "deficiency needs."Maslow
places the need for love and belongingness third on the ladder. Humans
have a desire to belong to groups: clubs, work groups, religious groups,
family, gangs, etc. We need to feel loved (non-sexual) by others, to be
accepted by others. Performers appreciate applause. We need to be needed.
Maslow says the need for self-actualization is "the desire to become
more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of
becoming." Would not everything then include the giving and receiving
of love to a romantic partner? In its absence I have not fully developed
and become everything I can be.
Maslow and Schuller both suggest that sexual or romantic love isn’t
a prerequisite to ultimate living. It is true that I may achieve greatness
as an individual without a partner. I may become a great writer, yogi
or tennis player, but I may still feel deep within a void, when romantic
love is absent.
In “The Space Between Us, Exploring the Dimensions of Human Relationships,
Ruthellen Josselson ( copyright 1996 Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks,
CA.) “Falling in love promises rebirth in the sense of newness of
the world and all that it contains, the person in love feels brand new,
able to experience a region of existence unimaginable beforehand. One
never falls in love in the same way twice. Falling in love can change
ones life even beyond the relationship, awakening novel thoughts, feelings
and goals. (csikszentmihalyi, 1980) As many poets have suggested, falling
in love may be a key to new worlds of experience.”
The experience of being in love in a committed, monogamous relationship
is like no other. I can love myself and reach self –actualization,
but still feel a void in my existence that only a romantic partnership
can fulfill. Loving another person in that special, romantic way is after
all, a necessary ingredient to reach my ultimate and complete self-actualization.
"Trust in God. Believe in yourself. Dare to dream."
-- Robert Schuller
Copyright 2005
Karen Jean Gaskell