You must learn to love yourself first

Love is a strange old thing.

As I said in my last post I'd tell women in my early twenties that I loved them without actually being sure what love actually was. My version of love was a bit genuinely screwed up.

I knew love as my Dad battering me behind a curtain in a pub because I was tired and wanted to go home. I knew love as my Dad screaming at me at the top of his voice and smashing a plate against the wall because I was eating too loud. Love was shouting and screaming because me,

I wasn't perfect.

And Dad was trying to protect me from myself.

I knew love as Mum waiting for days, weeks, sometimes months for her partner to come back to us, and her, crying on Christmas day, alone. I knew love as Mum falling in and out of relationships, all through my time with her, never to have that one steady guy that was always reliable. I also knew love as Mum incessantly worrying about everything and anything.

Love for me was pretty damn fucked up.

That's putting it lightly.

So when it was time for me to enter potentially loving relationships in my later years no surprises how all of them ended up. In fact, I think my longest ever relationship lasted for a month.

And then I worked on myself

[story here]

And as I began to grow and aspire and do good things with my life, and feel good about doing them, I would look back and think,

"Wow dude, you're pretty damn awesome"

So in short I started to like myself. Think positively about the way things were going, and feel good about what I was actually doing with my life.

But loving myself didn't stop at feeling good in my career and life I later realised. It also requires a certain amount of care. If I'm unwell, then I'll take myself to the doctors. Understanding the right foods to take and what works with me and what does not. Understanding emotions. Keeping healthy. And maintaining healthy friendships.

Loving myself was also caring for myself.

And when I finally knew what loving myself truly was - then I knew how to take that feeling onto others. I now know what love is.

And then I met an amazing woman. After a good four or five years of solitude. One like I had never been with before. One that treated me as a person and not an object. Safe to say I was swept off my feet from the start.

When I said to her I loved her, I knew I meant it!

And she knew it too.