" If you cannot love your Self, you cannot love another. Many people make the mistake of seeking love of Self through love for another. Of course, they don’t realize they are doing this. It is not a conscious effort. It’s what’s going on in the mind. Deep in the mind. In what you call the subconscious. They think: “If I can just love others, they will love me. Then I will be lovable, and I can love me.”
So many people hate themselves because they feel there is not another who loves them. This is a sickness—it’s when people are truly “lovesick” because the truth is, other people do love them, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how many people profess their love for them, it is not enough.
First, they don’t believe you. They think you are trying to manipulate them —trying to get something. (How could you love them for who they truly are? No. There must be some mistake. You must want something! Now what do you want?)
They sit around trying to figure out how anyone could actually love them. So they don’t believe you, and embark on a campaign to make you prove it. You have to prove that you love them. To do this, they may ask you to start altering your behavior.
Second, if they finally come to a place where they can believe you love them, they begin at once to worry about how long they can keep your love. So, in order to hold onto your love, they start altering their behavior. Thus, two people literally lose themselves in a relationship. They get into the relationship hoping to find themselves, and they lose themselves instead.
This losing of the Self in a relationship is what causes most of the bitterness in such couplings.
Two people join together in a partnership hoping that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, only to find that it’s less. They feel less than when they were single. Less capable, less able, less exciting, less attractive, less joyful, less content.
This is because they are less. They’ve given up most of who they are in order to be—and to stay—in their relationship.
Relationships were never meant to be this way. Yet this is how they are experienced by more people than you could ever know."- Neil Walsch