Across social media platforms you’ll see “be kind to yourself” memes that pop up daily. I suggest that we take this a step further and “Try being in love with yourself as a matter of basic principle.”
That changes the question, doesn’t it? Here, love becomes less a mood, vibe, or connection than a standing policy.
You do not have to wake up every morning dazzled by yourself, tho that would be amazing.
No, you simply stop treating your own person as an exception to the ordinary courtesies, loyalties, forgiveness, humor, patience, and protection you readily extend to someone you love.
The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Humor, Edited by Lydia Amir, with forward by John Morreall, gives us a much more interesting route into that idea than contemporary self-care language.
Amir traces a long philosophical tradition of self-referential laughter, including Democritus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Santayana, Dennett, Morreall and others. The important distinction is that laughing at yourself need not mean joining the prosecution. Properly understood, it creates enough distance to see yourself clearly while remaining on your own side.
It’s an insightful volume and I highly recommend it if you want to delve deeper into Montaigne and others who remind us that we can catch ourselves doing something completely idiotic, and still love ourselves.
I think the what we should be looking for is to: fall in love with yourself properly. Not narcissistically. Not ceremonially. Not through candles, manifestation journals, bath salts, or declaring yourself a goddess before coffee ☕️ . The key is to treat yourself the way you behave when you genuinely adore another human being.
When you love somebody, you learn their peculiarities. You know they lose their glasses while wearing them. You know which story they tell badly. You know they become irrational when hungry. You have seen their worst haircut. But none of these discoveries causes you to convene a tribunal about whether they remain worthy of affection.
Imagine loving someone and reviewing the relationship every evening according to their productivity.
“Darling, I remain fond of you, but you accomplished only four of the seven things on your list today. Unfortunately, affection has been suspended pending tomorrow’s performance.”
Love does not require thinking everything you do is wonderful. That would be useless. If I love myself, I can say, “Soph, that was an astonishingly bad idea,” with approximately the same affection one uses while watching a beloved dog walk confidently into a glass door.
This idea seems reasonable to me. I have, after all, been in a relationship with myself for quite some time. We share finances, memories, passwords, several regrettable haircuts, and absolutely every argument I have ever had in the shower. At this stage, leaving would be administratively complicated.
And yet “love yourself” has always struck me as rather vague advice. Love myself how? Are flowers involved? Must I gaze appreciatively into mirrors? Should I start leaving little notes in my lunch?
Then I realized that I already know how to love people. Most of us do.
When I love someone, I don’t require perfection before breakfast. I do not withdraw affection because they misplaced something, said something foolish, gained five pounds, forgot an appointment, failed magnificently at a new idea, or spent twenty minutes looking for a telephone that was in their hand. I generally think: there they go again.
And somehow the affection survives.
Perhaps that is the basic principle.
First: loving yourself means dropping the strange employment-review model of self-worth.
Second: affection and accurate judgment are perfectly compatible. You can love yourself and know you behaved badly. In fact, love may make correction easier because every mistake is no longer an existential referendum.
Third: learn to find yourself funny. This is where Montaigne and the Palgrave offer more insight . Being able to see yourself as a ridiculous little human creature doing your best is psychologically very different from contempt. The Handbook repeatedly distinguishes the value of this self-referential humor from simply directing ridicule outward.
Fourth: stop making self-love comparative. “I love myself because I am smarter/prettier/more successful/more interesting than X” is an unstable financing structure. Someone eventually walks into the room who is smarter, prettier, richer, younger, funnier, or capable of doing Pilates without making noises. Amir’s chapter specifically links the liberation of self-acceptance with escaping comparative emotions such as envy and jealousy. Easier said than done for most of us but heck, it’s an aspiration worthy of intentional pursuit. Anything to move the needle.
Finally: basic principle means you remain yours.
You have been present for every embarrassing incarnation of yourself. You know what happened. You know what you misunderstood. You know what you survived, what you ruined, what you repaired, what you still cannot explain, and what seemed terribly important in 2007 but mercifully no longer does. You are the only person who has accompanied you through the entire thing.
It seems a little rude, after all that, not to become friends. So yes, I am willing to try being in love with myself as a basic principle. Nothing excessive. I am not planning a destination wedding.
But I might at least stop threatening to break up with myself every time I make a mistake.
We have history.
