Loving Yourself Before You Can Love Someone Else

Dating is not always easy and it is further complicated if you are dating when you don't really love yourself. Now, here is where lessons from mature dating coming in. If you do not find that delicate balance between loving yourself with the proper attitude and not going overboard and believing yourself to be the greatest thing on earth, than you will have problems in your dating journey. Why do you need to love yourself? For starters, if you do not learn to love yourself, you will not be fully participating in a mature dating relationship with your romantic partner. You will have more than your fair share of unnecessary relationship conflicts and many of those can be avoided if you learn how to have a mature dating perspective.

What are some of the problems you'll have if you don't love yourself? One major factor is that you will have a low self-esteem. When you have a low self-esteem, that majorly hinders you from participating in a mature dating relationship. You unreasonably think that you are unworthy of love and you believe the lies that people, including yourself, have told you. Your past relationships have left you scarred and lonely and with a bunch of emotional baggage that will hinder you from fully enjoying a mature dating relationship. When you have this lack of self-esteem and you believe that you are not good enough and not worthy of finding a special love, you look for love in all the wrong places. You may be looking for love with abusive people, or married people, or incompatible people and just really always finding the same losing type of relationships. You cannot continue to be this way if you hope to someday find a love that is lasting and full of long-term commitment, it's just not possible. If you want to coexist in a mature dating relationship that can lead to true love, you need to make some changes in yourself.

Those changes begin when you take some time to focus on yourself and learn about your past and what happened in your previous relationships and why that emotional baggage makes you act the way you're acting. If you want to experience a true mature dating relationship, you need to take this step back and evaluate the situation before you even think about going out on another date or entering into another relationship that will be doomed to failure. The reason it's doomed to failure is because you have this lack of self-esteem and it causes you to gravitate to the wrong people for romantic partners.

Once you figure out that you need to learn to love yourself, you will be off to a good start. Years of past negative behaviors will not be so easily and quickly undone, but will take time to process and reevaluate and you will need to cut yourself some slack as you learn new mature dating behaviors. It is okay to be alone and not always in a relationship especially if you need time to clear your head and make the right choices. It's much better to be single then to continue to be in dating relationships that are not mature ones. No matter what your past has done to you, you need to process it and get out of the victim mentality and then move on to a new beginning, renewing your self-esteem and garnering new self-confidence and loving yourself and knowing deep down in your heart that you are loveable and deserve to be loved.

# Still finding ♥ in my life #