The poet Maya Angelou, in one of her later interviews, said some pretty brutal things about love and relationships, and you’ll find them interesting. Roughly, this is what she said:
“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves… You cannot love a person if you don’t love yourself
You can want her or want him… want to possess something.
But to love; love liberates.”
And then she referred to an African saying:
“Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt”
It’s very fitting that this came from a poet, because she can get away with talking about love in abstract, poetic terms…
Even so, there’s a grain of psychological truth in Maya Angelou’s line, but taken literally, it’s too extreme.
Even the saying about the naked person offering you a shirt is a strong image: someone who cannot give themselves something basic may offer it to someone else, but perhaps out of an unmet need they haven’t worked through, not from a real capacity.
But it wouldn’t be accurate to say:
“If a person doesn’t love themselves, they can’t love anyone.”
If that’s true, we’re finished. Last one out, turn off the lights.
The question you need to ask yourself is:
To what extent can a person who doesn’t love themselves, doesn’t accept themselves or cannot sustain themselves internally genuinely love another person, and when does that “love” become more like need, possession, dependency, idealisation or using the other person to regulate their own emptiness?
If you’ve had a disastrous experience in love (who hasn’t?), and you’ve been on the receiving end of someone else’s self-esteem issues, I’m not going to give you an answer based on poetry here, but on what psychology says, in case you’ve asked yourself this question too.
Let’s see:
Current research doesn’t support a simple equation like “more self-esteem = better relationship”. In fact, there’s a recent study, “Self-esteem and romantic relationship quality”, which says the evidence is mixed and that self-esteem doesn’t operate directly, but through mechanisms such as trust, reciprocal behaviours and relationship satisfaction.
In other words, self-esteem influences the quality of relationships, but not in a simple, direct or automatic way. A person’s self-esteem can activate a causal chain involving trust, how the other person is perceived, reciprocal behaviours and relationship satisfaction.
This matters.
I love Maya as a writer, one of the best, but poetry and art are one thing, and human relationships are more complicated than that.
So we can’t turn the phrase “if you don’t love yourself, you can’t love others” into cheap pop psychology.
But, but… there are relevant patterns:
Low self-esteem can make a person doubt the other person’s love, misread their signals, expect rejection or react defensively. As Murray, Holmes and Griffin found in their classic study, people with low self-esteem tended to underestimate how much their partners valued them.
Relationship-contingent self-esteem has also been studied.
What?
This means that when personal worth depends too much on how the relationship is going, emotional ups and downs intensify and the bond becomes more unstable.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
You’ve probably lived it, or worse, witnessed it in your friends’ relationships.
There’s also another study on self-compassion and close relationships which found that self-compassion is usually associated with secure attachment, healthier relational functioning, better conflict repair and more adaptive behaviours in close bonds.
Meaning: the relationship with yourself doesn’t determine everything, but it does affect how you love, how you receive love and how you tolerate frustration within the relationship.
Put simply: low self-esteem doesn’t mean someone is incapable of loving another person, but, to conclude, we can say that how you feel about yourself will affect your relationship with others.
If this is a problem for you, do you know what you can do? This:
Love,
Noemi
P.S. For the nerds in the room, see link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4.
P.S. Now, if you’re a nerd, but you also want to do more than studying the theory and actually apply it to what’s going on in your own life, click this link.
