"I must conquer my loneliness alone," wrote the poet, Peter McWilliams. "I must be happy with myself or I have nothing to offer you."
"Two halves have little choice but to join; and yes, they do make a whole.
But two wholes when they coincide....that is beauty. That is love."
What McWilliams is expressing poetically is that self-love is the primary prerequisite for a healthy marriage. The first thing you can do to improve your marriage is to learn to love yourself more. You must have a good sense of yourself, or secure ego boundaries, to be able to meet the challenge of being in a close, intimate relationship with another human being.
Intuitively, it makes sense that you have to love yourself to be in a healthy relationship but I'd still like to list the reasons why this is so. I believe there are five:
- Without sufficient self-love you won't have as much love to give to your spouse. You can't fully give to another what you don't grant to yourself.
- Without sufficient self-love, you will bring more needs than resources to your marriage. You'll expect your spouse to give you more love because of your lack of self-love. Since such a lack is usually learned in childhood, I assume that unconsciously you'll expect your spouse to make up for what you missed as a child.
I also assume that two people at the same level of self-love, or with a similar degree of childhood pain, marry each other. If both you and your spouse are low in self-esteem, you'll both be ripe for disappointment. Each of you will bring more need for love to the marriage but neither of you will have sufficient resources to fully meet the needs of the other.
- Without a strong sense of yourself, you may be more willing to tolerate unacceptable behavior in your spouse. You may believe you don't deserve better treatment.
- Without good self-esteem, you'll be more likely to perceive attack or rejection from your spouse when it was not really intended. You'll be more sensitive to criticism if you don't have a good opinion of yourself, and may have trouble accepting genuine expressions of love.
- Without sufficient self-love, you will have more difficulty handling what I call the twin terrors of engulfment and abandonment. To me, this is the major reason why those who are low in self-esteem have painful marital difficulties.
In marriage, two conflicting human desires are played out, sometimes with great emotional intensity. On the one hand, you want to be intimate with your spouse but fear becoming too controlled or hurt. On the other hand, you want to be separate, autonomous and protected from hurt but fear being alone. The greater your self-love and the stronger your ego boundaries, the better you will be able to deal with these seemingly conflicting desires with their concomitant fears. You won't be so afraid of either extreme because, first and foremost, you'll have a good relationship with yourself.
People who are too low in self-esteem are unable to handle these conflicting desires at the same time. They are the type of couple who can't live with each other and can't live without each other. They often vacillate back and forth between intense love and flight and usually become stuck at the level of intimacy they can tolerate.
So learn to love yourself more. It could automatically help your marriage without you ever having to fruitlessly nag your spouse to be more loving.
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