CAN WE LOVE SOMEONE ELSE IF WE DON'T LOVE OURSELVES?

My flatmate and I are always on the hunt for some new TV show to watch in the evening, to relax after a day of work and public transports, sitting on our sofa with a cup of tea. It's our way to unwind before it's bedtime on a school day. Our newest discovery is "RuPaul's Drag race", we love the creativity of these 14 people who show off their best assets for our entertainment. The show is great in so many ways, but after hearing every night RuPaul's line "if you don't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?", I could not help but reflect on what it means. What I have noticed very often, in recent years, is the growing number of blogs on "how to love yourself". I have read articles on people saying that they were single because they didn't love themselves. I even had a boyfriend who felt the need to break up with me because he wanted to learn to love himself first. So, I take it, that this is a really serious issue of our time. The need for hiding from a potential lover's gaze, makes me instantly think of one of the most famous quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre: hell is other people. In his existentialist play, "No Exit", Sartre presents his idea of hell: three characters find themselves sitting in a mysterious room without doors or windows, condemned to be locked in it for eternity. At first, they think they have been brought there to be tortured, but slowly they begin to understand that they have been placed together to make each other miserable, by asking questions and passing judgment, they end up being their own torturers. Hell is The Look that we experience when we are forced to recognise that we exist also as a mere object of observation in the world of others, which makes us feel ashamed because vulnerable and exposed to criticism. So, is it possible that sometimes we are experiencing the "look" that we receive from our loved one as our personal hell? We despise ourselves so much that we don't want to be judged, without even waiting to know if their opinion of us will be positive or negative. I recently read an article by Lonnie Aarssen about the absurdity of human existence. He proposes that the definition of "Homo Sapiens" no longer suits us and at some point, we became what he calls "Homo Absurdus": a human that spends its whole life trying to convince itself that its existence is not absurd. Evolution brought into our mind the idea that we are not only a physical body but also a separate inner self. The result of the self-awareness of a being who knows it will die is constant fear that material death will annihilate what we have accomplished in life, which at some point would be as if we had never existed at all. We then live trying to leave something behind, to be remembered, which causes us various degrees of anxiety. Could it be, that it has become so common to despise ourselves because of the absurdity of our existence? Is it because if we don't have this great legacy to leave behind, we consider ourselves a total failure? I personally see it as a very plausible option, but what I am asking myself is, since we are unhappy with our own achievements, does it mean that we have no choice but being alone, to avoid others' gaze? However, even Sartre himself explained that he never meant that our relationship with other people is always poisoned, it only brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us. Aristotle said man is by nature a social animal, meaning that we naturally tend to form communities and live together. Heidegger defines the being of every human as “Being-with”, meaning that we all live with others, and we could not live without them. The relation between the human being and others is called “solicitude”, which means caring for someone who needs help, by opening up possibilities for them, so that they can freely realise their own project and their own humanity. If we, then, accept (and I do), that human beings tend, by nature, to have relations with one another, escaping them is not an option. I agree that if our mind is pathologically troubled by feelings of self-hatred, we might struggle to love someone else. But that is a different issue. We all want to become a better version of ourselves, and we all want to learn to love ourselves, but is it impossible to let the love of others and for others help us achieve that? In the “Symposium” Plato makes Phaedrus say that love makes us better people: Eros induces us to make noble gestures because we don't want to look bad in front of the person we love, "for what lover would not choose rather to be seen by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand death rather than to endure this". If someone wants us to open the door to them and they are willing to come in and see what's inside, is it not unfair of us to decide for them, that they will not like it? As Thurgood Marshall said "none of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody […] bent down and helped us pick up our boots"; shouldn't we take the hand of this person who wants to bend down and help us? I think that if we run away once, we will want to run away again, but unless one's Usain Bolt, running won't take us very far in life. Maybe the ultimate gesture of self- love is to try to forgive ourselves for not being perfect and let who stands in front of us see us for what we are. Maybe once we perform this act of courage and expose ourselves as the imperfect being that we are, we will be able to love our inevitably faulty self as much as the person standing in front of us. A couple of books that I would recommend reading: 1) “The self esteem solution” by Clay Andrews; to stop feeling unworthy (that you can buy clicking here) 2) “Should you leave?” by Peter Kramer; to explore questions as “How do mood states affect our assessment of our partner and theirs of us? What does working on a relationship truly entail? When should we try to improve a relationship, and when should we leave?” (that you can buy clicking here)

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