Isn’t it striking that the thing we’ve interacted with every day from our earliest moments is something many of us were never taught actually how to do? Not to mention it is all around us. At school, at the grocery store, in the neighborhood, in the digital world, at work, in our current homes and the places where we grew up. Relationships. No matter if you’re navigating your first romantic relationship or figuring out friendships as an adult, it can seem like there’s more confusion than clarity. Often we’re left wondering…is there an instruction manual for all this?
Recently I picked up “all about love” by bell hooks, a 13 chapter exploration of what we mean when we say “love” and a challenge to broaden our understanding of love beyond romantic love and romantic relationships. What immediately struck me was her reflection that love is something that we all encounter yet there rarely seems to be a common agreed upon definition. As children, we are not born knowing how to love. We are expected to just absorb and know what love is. We then bring this formed expectation of love and relationships into adulthood. Regardless of the example, good or bad, that we received of loving relationships, we absorb it and it becomes a part of our own understanding.
When asked what love means, someone may respond with an example of a loving relationship from tv, the commonly discussed “love languages”, or rather give an example of what love is not. But what could happen to our relationships if we operated from a common description and understanding?
bell hooks offers a description of loving that could drastically impact how we view love, and subsequently relationships of all kinds, including the most important relationship we may ever have – the relationship we have with ourselves. She writes, “when we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.” Definitions matter as they give us the map to know where we are going. In using this definition as a guidepost, we can continually assess how in line with being loving we are in our relationships. We can ask questions like: am I openly and honestly expressing affection to another person? How am I both giving and taking responsibility and trust? What would it be like to extend respect and care to myself? bell hooks continues after posing this definition with another challenge, “Self love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it, our other efforts to love fail.” Many of us have heard the expression to put on your oxygen mask before helping someone else with theirs. And many therapists are guilty of using this cliche or others like it, because despite being viewed as cringe by my teenage clients, it has real merit and truth to it! The health of every relationship in our lives depends first on us attending to our relationship with ourselves. It is the foundation to establishing a loving practice in our relationship with others. So using those same aspects of the loving definition earlier, let’s apply those to our relationship with ourselves. Care for yourself, affection for yourself, self-responsibility, self-respect, commitment to yourself, and trusting yourself.
Take a moment and notice, maybe even say out loud, each of those words and see how they feel in your body as you speak them or read them silently.
Loving is…
Care
Affection
Responsibility
Respect
Commitment
Trust
Do you notice a tightness in your chest or body while reading or saying any of them? Do some feel easier to accept than others? Where does each word feel like it lives in your body? Do any emotions come up regarding one word or another? How does it feel to think about extending these words and actions to yourself versus extending them to another person?
Our reactions and gut feelings matter in giving us valuable information about ourselves. They offer us the opportunity to express some self-compassion as we approach this roadmap towards loving relationships. The start of the journey to genuine, authentic, loving relationships begins with ourselves.
Many of us didn’t learn healthy relationships from childhood or have examples of love to act as a foundation for our future selves. If you relate to this, hope for healthy relationships with self and others is not lost (despite it still feeling really, really hard at times and that’s still okay.) Starting as children we long for the seemingly unconditional love that we see in Disney movies, hear about in rom-coms, and listen to in love songs. However, bell hooks explains that in reality it is difficult to actually extend this unconditional love to others because we cannot control their behavior or our own responses to their actions despite our best, or most perfectly planned out efforts.
Despite a desire to be unconditional in our loving relationships, including those with friends, family, even pets, we may still struggle due to the sheer nature of the unpredictability of interacting with another being. For a lighter example, if you’ve ever owned a cat that you love so much but your cat gives you the tail when you want to give and receive its affection, you know what I mean. It could also look like people-pleasing behaviors such as neglecting your own desires to default to your friend, family member, or partner’s wants to avoid feeling like you’ve upset them or let them down. While it may seem like you are extending unconditional love in this relationship, because you are doing whatever it takes to keep them feeling happy and prioritizing their feelings over everything else, it ends up feeling more like resentment than love.
The door to experiencing the unconditional love in relationships that we desire begins with our own self-love. Bell hooks describes this unconditional love as “sustained acceptance and affirmation” which is especially important if that is not the baseline we are operating from in our early childhood experiences of love and relationships.
You may be wondering, okay I get that self-love is important, but how does this relate to experiencing loving relationships with others?
Hooks offers that “When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.”
Think about the oxygen mask again. Having our own oxygen (unconditional self-love) flowing to our lungs allows us then to act from a place of having our needs met and extend an oxygen mask (being loving in relationship) to someone else. We are not reliant entirely on all of our needs being sustained by another being. Rather, we have the ability to extend loving, sustained acceptance and affirmation to ourselves so we are operating from a place of contentment when entering into relationship, rather from a place of lacking.
A loving relationship with ourselves doesn’t always just look like putting on a facemask, eating a comforting meal, or buying that new video game we’ve been wanting under the guise of “self-care.” These also matter, don’t get me wrong! But it also looks like attending to our own needs, breath, and body in a stressful situation. Prioritizing our own needs, regulation, and self-love then allows us to then act loving to others. And it’s not as complicated as it may seem. Here’s an example.
In the latest season of Ted Lasso, (don’t worry, no spoilers ahead) there’s a scene where the main character Ted notices his colleague and friend in distress. She’s crying, her breathing is fast and shaky. Ted asks for her permission to sit down next to her on the sofa. Once sitting next to her, he doesn’t offer condolences, ask questions, or demand an explanation of her emotional state. Rather, he notices his own breath, begins taking slow inhales and exhales, and offers her his presence and steadiness without saying anything. This is co-regulation. He is operating from a place of fulfillment and his own self-love by slowing his breathing, fidgeting with his hands to calm his anxiety and nervous system first. This then sends signals to his friend’s nervous system right next to him that there is enough calm and safety there for the both of them. Eventually, Ted’s friend is able to slow her own breathing by following Ted’s lead. Remember, at no point did he say “take a deep breath.” He just focused on extending some care and affection to himself which then through co-regulation, helped him show up loving in relationship to his friend.
It doesn’t take always knowing the right words to say, but rather being able to offer your own self-love to others through connection and co-regulation.
As a therapist working with high schoolers, I often walk with teens who are navigating relationships of all kinds – friendships, romantic relationships, family relationships, you name it. This is a critical time where teens make decisions about who they hang out with, start to take steps towards who they want to be, and experience both the celebration and the heartache that comes with changes in relationships.
Many times as I’ve talked with teens going through their first breakup or feeling left behind by friends during prom season, I address what they were going through as grief, which seemed to be an impactful reframing. A breakup or the sudden change in friendship can truly feel like loss. Especially if we spend a lot of the relationship focused on the other person’s needs over our own, then it feels like the loss of another person as well as a loss of a big part of ourselves.
But imagine if during those teenage years what could happen if instead of building a foundation of one’s identity, self-worth, and fulfillment fully into the hands of others, the foundation of a genuine, loving relationship to oneself was established instead. This does not mean isolation or absence of relationships by any means, but rather establishing the strong foundation of self-love so that we can enter into these relationships from a place of fulfillment already.
So while there’s no actual instruction manual for navigating relationships, when individuals are grounded in the idea of loving as Care, Affection, Responsibility, Respect, Commitment, Trust, we can enter into any kind of relationship with a compass of sorts to keep us on track, and redirect if we feel off base. And at the true north of that compass, we can always find our relationship to ourselves.