self-love?

i feel compelled to talk about this subject because my oldest daughter believes in this new paradigm of relationships: self-love--it's this idea of loving yourself before you can love others. if it sounds familiar, you're probably recalling the ultra-popular song that proclaims, "learning to love yourself...is the greatest love of all".

i believe it stems from people who place the blame on themselves for the failure of their relationships. was i too needy? too suffocating? too cold? too jealous? why? the blame apparently, lies with not having enough self-respect, nay, "self-love" in order to learn to love "the right way".

now wait a second--if i don't already know how to love the right way to begin with, how on earth do i know then that i'm  loving myself the right way--as in a "non-narcissistic" manner? newsflash: all normal people are inherently narcissistic and selfish. and we do not handout medals for that. but we honor and venerate the heroes who give their lives for others.

personally i believe that loving oneself is an oxymoron. love does not go in the inward direction. only outward. you can not love yourself because it ceases to become love once you do. and there is no wrong way to love, there are only only people who call love's perversion as love. and self-love is a perversion of love. because the only way to experience the glory of love is in loving others. it's that feeling that you get that can't be described. only love can do that. give and give and yet get back a thousand fold in a different way.

and which you don't ever get to feel  or experience in loving yourself. that alone should be enough to convince you that self-love is not really love.

maybe i'm just getting caught up in terminology. you can call it by any other name but love. yet still i don't believe that "liking" yourself is the remedy or cure for why your relationships fail. relationships fail because in spite of love, people are not perfect, so they manifest love imperfectly. you can "love" yourself all you want but being imperfect, chances are you'd end up just being so full of yourself and still alone.

because love in and of itself is all about sacrifice, kindness and compassion. all living things are born with the innate will to live and survive, mostly at the expense of others. as such all living things including us, are inherently selfish. our first reaction would be to take care of number 1. but what makes us different from other living things is our inherent capacity to love. what for? it's to give our life meaning and purpose. it's our transcendental quality. it's our God-like attribute. and it's only meaningful when directed to others.

to me it's less important that my relationship fails as long as i gave it my best effort. i don't blame anyone because no one is perfect. i do not love in fear of losing or failure because i realize that permanence is just an illusion. instead, i take losing or failure as another reason or chance to love again. because in the end loving is all that matters....

the rest my dear Kristina, is all just New Age psycho-babble.