"Me First!" Relationship

A friend of mine recently asked me: "What is the greatest lesson you've learned in relationship?"

To listen to, trust, and love myself - first and foremost.

How can that be? After all, isn't a relationship about loving someone else?

It seems to me that the world is saturated with false paradigms of "love". Magazines tout tactics to "make the guy love you more in bed" - never mind whether his heart is in it or not. Those fifty years of marriage could just as easily have been fifty years of misery. A parent helping a child with a simple task may in fact be an expression of a lack of confidence in the child's ability to do it herself.

Are these acts loving or disempowering? What are these notions of "love" we carry in relationship?

I was astounded by the arrogance expressed by a friend's mother recently. Commenting about her daughter's boyfriend, she said, "You know, he comes from a broken family, so he really doesn't know what a healthy relationship is." Never mind that, for 50 years, this same mother had subjected herself to a cycle of anger, frustration, and pain at not being noticed by her own husband. Had she exemplified for her daughter a "healthy relationship" by staying in her marriage? Or would the more loving thing - for herself, her husband, and her children - have been to end the marriage, freeing them all to open their hearts to a higher form of love? Who is to say her daughter's boyfriend didn't learn and grow more from his parents' divorce than if they had stayed together?

Conversations with God says: "Relationships fail when you see them as life's grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.... Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self...."

He continues, "The Master understands that it doesn't matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn't matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that. The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered."

Wait a minute. How is that possible? Isn't that selfish? And isn't selfishness bad?

Certainly this is contrary to most sacredly held definitions of love. Love is selfless, isn't it?

Yes. In fact, love has been characterized for most of us by selflessness: that is, absence of the Self, forgetting of the Self, disregard for the needs of the Self. We have been programmed over and over again to devalue the Self, to subsume our desires to others', to convince ourselves that what we feel doesn't matter - because that is precisely what others have modeled for us.

We've seen our mother deny time for herself. We've seen our father plaster a smile over his anguish. We've seen adults "protect" children by pretending there's nothing wrong. (It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned of family patterns that were hidden from me throughout my childhood. And yet, once I learned of them, it opened a window of understanding into why I had been repeating the same patterns in my life. I didn't know they were there, and yet I had absorbed them all the same.)

But love is unconditional, isn't it? It means not putting conditions or expectations on my love for the other person, right?

Yes. True love is unconditional. Yet unconditional love isn't truly unconditional if the most important person is missing from the equation: me. I must also be unconditionally loving towards myself.

So what does that mean?

It means that for all of the conditions and judgment one chooses not to place on the other person, one must also remove the conditions and judgments one places on one's self.

It means stop putting conditions on your love for yourself. Stop judging yourself for being who you are and feeling the way you feel. Stop telling yourself, "As soon as I...." (Or "As soon as he/she...") That is a condition. It's delaying self-love based on the presumption that I (or someone else) have to meet certain conditions I've set for myself before I can do what is truly loving for me. Unconditional love for another matters not one whit if there is a lack of unconditional love for one's Self.

In many ways, every relationship is a mirror. How I feel towards the other person and what I see in them is often an indicator of how I see and feel towards myself. My relationships reflect back to me those areas where I am not loving myself enough. If I allow someone to treat me a particular way, it is only because part of me is already treating myself that way. Otherwise, why would I accept it from them?

Have you every met anyone who truly loves herself yet is still able to be critical of others?

Every criticism or trigger shows me how severely I criticize myself. If it bothers me to watch another person be inauthentic or put on a show rather than be fully present and true, it's usually an indication that - in some form or another - I do the very same. Otherwise, why would it bother me so? How is it possible to despise in another what I accept within myself?

One simple way to put it is this: No one can push my buttons unless I have the buttons to push.

Again, every relationship is a mirror - a mirror for the relationship I have with myself.

Relationships provide me with the opportunity to uncover aspects of "me" that I didn't know I had hidden from myself: ways in which I'd been living inauthentically, giving my power over to another, devaluing my role and my desires in the relationship, judging my emotional reactions as unworthy or inaccurate - despite how insistently they were hammering against my heart.

Therefore, the purpose of a relationship is not for me to see them or them to see me - it is for me to see me. If I am too busy seeing them, I am not seeing me. And I am the only one truly in a relationship here.... with myself.

Again, Conversations with God speaks to this: "The highest choice is that which produces the highest good for you.... and the highest good for you becomes the highest good for another.... What you do for your Self, you do for another. What you do for another, you do for the Self. This is because you and the other are one. And this is because.... There is naught but You."

There is naught but me.

Therefore, as I listen to, trust, and love myself - and take those actions that are most loving towards me - only then can I truly love another. For now I truly love myself.