Ladies, you cannot love a man, if you do not love yourself!

Fact: You cannot love someone else if you do not love yourself!  Fact: Trying to find someone to love you in order for you to love yourself will ruin you more than it will help you.

Fact: Some, if not most people will probably take advantage of the fact that you do not love yourself, because they realize that your lack of self love will cause you to have low self esteem/self respect, which in turn will make you do anything or accept anything they give whether its  is good or bad.

Loving yourself isn’t narcissistic, selfish or conceited, nothing like that. It is a metaphysical belief that is proving itself to me. It’s the belief that no one can possibly love you, if you don’t love and respect yourself.

When you feel good about yourself, your whole world shifts. You know you’re valuable and have lots to offer. When you feel that way, it radiates. You become selective with whom you associate yourself with. Life becomes smooth.

Loving yourself doesn’t mean looking in the mirror and feeling warm and fuzzy about what stares back at you. It means being someone you can respect. Things you cannot change (skin color, family’s social status) should never come into that evaluation.

What you need is to become that person. Get a job, be good at it. Then get a better job. Figure out your goals in terms of career, money, and personal growth and pursue them. Along the way refine those goals until you have something akin to a mission statement, something for which you’re reasonably sure of both your desire and ability to obtain.

The person you want to be is someone you have to create. Once you know what your goals are and you know you are on the path to achieving them, then go out and find a partner who is doing the same. Find someone who enjoys being themselves, who attracts you, who knows what they want and is on the path towards it.

You have to realize that the problem is you. You do not like who you are, and that is a fact. Being with someone while you are in this state is hell for both parties. The fix is to become someone who you can respect. This is what people mean when they say “You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself”.Of course you can feel love for others (you are human) but it wont be a healthy love for either of you because your trying to give something you’re not understanding.

A few of the ways it can manifest itself could be:

• You don’t think your worthy of love (subconsciously, if you can’t love you, who can), so when you find someone who loves you, You may become clingy, jealous, controlling, constantly self sabotaging your relationships etc. None of these are considered healthy love yet, they are regularly happening; in society it gets accepted as love…i.e “I know he loves me because he got Jealous when I spoke to so & so”

• Another case may be ‘rather than not love, we just can’t believe someone would love us, so we push those around away until we are alone which then confirms to the ego it was right all along about being unlovable.

“It is important for both people in a relationship to have a personal core of self esteem (you could even call this a healthy ego). The relationship is between two distinct beings. Contrast this with a relationship when you do not have a strong sense of self. You feel unimportant, unnoticed, unloved, etc. So you tend to get your sense of self by glomming on to the other person in a relationship. Now, this is no longer a healthy relationship between two people. It is a single leaky boat where one person is getting their self esteem from the other party. This is unstable and will frequently fail.”

There is a quote by Maya Angelou,”I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ … There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

First learn to love yourself. Be true to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be loyal to yourself. Be generous to yourself. Forgive yourself. Accept yourself. Love yourself. Start the love journey with yourself. Then start loving others.

We search for love outside. In our degrees. In our jobs. In our businesses. In our relationships. In our materialistic things. In every passer by. In reality, it’s deep inside us. It can only be found within

Bottom Line: I think if you don’t love yourself, you will be blinded to love around you. You wont be able to accept it from others, and the love you try to give wont be healthy and may do more harm than good. To love another, you must first love, respect and accept yourself and be happy with who you are. To be happy with who you are, you must improve on yourself everyday and create the person you really want to be; the person you will love, accept, respect, trust and admire. Remember that “improvement” is constant and never ending. Take it one day at a time, no one is saying its easy, but it can be done. You can learn to love yourself.

Join me in my continuous journey to self actualization and improvement.

Chinny Okoye is the founder of  The Women NG