You Are Whole All By Yourself

"You have to love yourself before someone else will ever love you." This is a lie that has turned into a cliché and a meme that is accepted as sage wisdom and sets everyone up for failure and disappointment. Where to begin dismantling this? "If I am not in a relationship, that must be my fault. I need to get my shit together completely before I am with someone. (Impossible.) If I loved myself in the right way/enough someone would love me, but they don't, so I am a failure, which makes me hate myself, so I will always be alone as punishment." Spin. Repeat. The world is full of people who hate themselves and who have never not been in a relationship, so that kind of blows that theory out of the water. Do they have the kind of relationship I would want to have? Debatable. My concern is that the "loving yourself" credo has been put into motion solely in the hopes of a payoff of finding someone else rather than of actually loving yourself. Loving yourself must be the end game, not a bargaining chip for getting someone else. You are the love of your life. The one you have been waiting for. You. Period. There is no one else, now or coming in the future. You are spending the entirety of your life with yourself, that is a given, so why wouldn't you put time, energy, attention, and care into that relationship. Sure there are lots of other wonderful people that may move through your life. Friends, lovers, spouses, collaborators. They will be important, influential, supportive, deserving of your love and respect and devotion, but they are not your other half. They will not fix you or complete you. You are whole all by yourself. Women fall for this myth the hardest. Fear of dying alone, of being a cardigan-wearing cat-lady hoarder, who shares Fancy Feast with 15 feral feline companions. "Why aren't you with someone? Aren't you lonely? Be careful, if you are single too long, you will forget how to compromise who you are to make someone else happy." I just read a powerful article by Lena Dunham about being alone after a breakup, that had me nodding my head so much in agreement, I strained my neck. The line that made my heart skip, was this: "this pure and fiery solitude, is the time in which women form themselves—and that a patriarchal society has removed that privilege from us through the threat of eternal loneliness as a penance for the sin of loving yourself." Society has told us that the saddest thing imaginable is not being a couple, and that you are only half of something, incomplete if you are single. I love being single. Not because I want to keep my options open, or date a lot, or I am afraid of having a relationship, but because I genuinely love my own company. Solo. First and foremost. I find utter contentment in living alone. I have a roommate I share a kitchen with who is as much of a soloist as I am. Yes, I have two cats. No, I do not own a cardigan. There was a time where I loved being part of a couple. Sharing a home and a life and a world with someone else. It was great. I cherish that time and the person I was with. I also do not feel compelled to do that again. It is not an either-or situation, either you are alone or you are with someone, and one is not better than the other. Personally, I prefer living alone and not being part of a couple. It feels the opposite of lonely. It feels expansive to me. I caution you not to tolerate or make the best of being single until the real thing comes along.

• You are the real thing.
• You are the main thing.
• Savor that.

Fling yourself completely into that love affair. That is the relationship of and for a lifetime, and anything else is just sprinkles on top.