It Starts with Loving Yourself

I definitely believe that we must love ourselves in order to be a truly happy, lasting and satisfying partner in a relationship. First and foremost, how can you honestly expect and ask someone to love you – if you don’t love yourself? I’m not talking about being conceited and thinking you are better than other people — this is about loving, caring and respecting yourself.

I just read a wonderful chapter in True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper and More Passionate by Daphne Rose Kingma and I have to share it with you….

Love Yourself

All too many of us consider love to be the miracle by which, finally, we will become complete human beings. This is the fixer-upper notion of love, the idea that we’re not all right as we are, but if we can just get loved by somebody, then that will prove that we’re ok.

Ironically, however, in order to be well loved, you need first to love yourself. For in love, we get not necessarily what we deserve, but what we THINK we deserve. Just as Harry Homeowner who has a house that’s worth one million dollars might sell it for only $500,000 if that’s all he thinks it’s worth, so the person who underestimates his or her own value will be be shortchanged in love.

Love begets love. If you don’t think well of yourself, you can’t be positively affected by the person who is celebrating you for the specialness you don’t believe you have. If you don’t know, and love, what’s important, special, precious, and beautiful about yourself, you can be sure you will not be serenaded, sent roses, lauded, paraded or daily smothered in kisses by someone who does.

Loving yourself is knowing yourself, enjoying and valuing yourself, and understanding that self-knowledge i a lifelong personal enterprise. It means that you appreciate yourself at least as much as you value your honey, that you know he or she is lucky in love as you believe you are. It means you measure your strengths and weaknesses neither with the abuse of self deprecation not the insanity of ego mania, but with genuineness, with accuracy. Loving yourself is recognizing your gifts and talents, and putting them to good use, acknowledging your flaws, and forgiving yourself for them. Loving yourself is reaching for more, for the best, in yourself.

So often we put up with shabby treatment in love because we don’t believe we deerve better. But self love is always a model for the love you may reasonably expect, the true measure of the love you will give and get. Your heart can only hold as much love as you believe it can. So treat yourself better, believe you deserve to be treated well, and you will get treated ever more wonderfully in love.

True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper and More Passionate by Daphne Rose Kingma – pages 30  – 31

Pursue Your Purpose and Then Pursue a Relationship

I just started reading The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida – and will definitely look forward to sharing some excerpts and look forward to hearing your thoughts. Here is the first and its on his website

Your Purpose Must Come Before Your Relationship

Every man knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence.

Admit to yourself that if you had to choose one or the other, the perfect intimate relationship or achieving your highest purpose in life, you would choose to succeed at your purpose. Just this self-knowledge often relieves much pressure a man feels to prioritize his relationship when, in fact, it is not his highest priority.

Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner. The next time you notice yourself “giving in” to your woman, postponing your mission and denying your true purpose in order to spend time with her, stop. Tell your woman that you love her, but you cannot deny your heart’s purpose. Tell her that you will spend 30 minutes (or some specific time) with her in absolute attention and total presence, but then you must return to carry on your mission.

Your woman will be more fulfilled with 30 minutes a day of undivided attention and ravishing love than she will with a few hours of your weak and divided presence when your heart really isn’t into it. Time you spend with your woman should be time you really want to be with her more than anything else. If you’d rather be doing something else, she’ll feel it. Both of you will be dissatisfied.

From The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida, Chapter 7

Purchase from Amazon

For more information – http://www.deida.info/books/the-way-of-the-superior-man/your-purpose-must-come-your-relationship