What’s Self-Love Got To Do With It? My Wedding at Age 47

I’ve always wanted to make the lifelong commitment of partnership in marriage, and it’s been a very long journey for me to get to my wedding day at age 47. I spent a lot of my adult life in painful patterns when it came to romantic relationship, which included being attracted to those who weren’t really available, and not able, for their own reasons – and I say this without any blame – to meet and love me in all the ways I wanted to be met and loved. And I wasn’t willing to settle for a relationship that wasn’t truly right for me.

It has taken a lot of determination, courage and persistence to overcome and heal the obstacles within me that got in the way of experiencing the relationship I wanted, and indeed to become the kind partner that I would myself want to commit to.

I could write a whole book about the process (maybe one day I will), but for now I’ll just say that the most important aspect of it has been (and always will be) my commitment to Love in my primary relationship – my relationship with myself.

Love with a capital “L” is unconditional – it can’t be fallen out of. So even when I fall out of “like” with myself, it’s always in the greater context of my commitment to loving myself, which means I always come back to the recognition that I am unconditionally loveable and worthy of love.

We all know that Self-Love can be a real challenge. It requires commitment to doing what it takes to have a truly healthy relationship with ourselves – an ongoing deepening of self-awareness, attunement and kind responsiveness to our needs and feelings, being open to seeing things about ourselves that are hard to look at and own, and learning to embrace parts of us that we feel the impulse to push away and disconnect from.

But it is so incredibly worth it – and the alternative certainly isn’t a recipe for happiness – because self-love, or the lack of it, sets the tone – and determines the quality – of all of our relationships. Whilst I’m loving and embracing myself, I can’t not be loving my husband… I can’t not be loving everyone (which definitely includes setting healthy boundaries, and sometimes walking away, of course).

Even when I don’t like parts of them. Even when there’s conflict and it’s painful. My commitment to Love guides me back home to my deepest self and invites me to do the work I need to do to meet the other with Love – whether it’s learning to communicate more clearly and kindly, listening openly to feedback, or soothing and holding the vulnerable parts of myself more fully and compassionately when there’s reactivity in our relating, to name a few examples.

Whether I’m coaching an individual or a couple around their relationships, I see that the most important part of my job is to keep inviting folk back to their relationship with themselves. That’s always what needs kind and loving tending to first, whatever is happening in their relationships with others.

Which is why I’m so passionate about supporting people with self-love, and with making it practical – so it’s more than just an idea, or yet another thing to have to achieve or “get right”.