Do You Have to Love Yourself First to Find Love?

After 34 years and 1,400 couples, my answer is no. And I’ll show you what to do instead of waiting.

Do You Have to Love Yourself First? The Short Answer

No. You do NOT have to be finished, healed, fully confident or entirely at peace with yourself before you’re allowed to date. If that were the requirement almost nobody would ever qualify, and I’d have been out of a job in 1992.

What you do need is smaller and much more achievable. Stop speaking to yourself in a way you’d never speak to another human being, and know the two or three things you genuinely will not compromise on.

That’s the entry fee, folks. Nothing more.

I say this as somebody who has matched more than 1,400 couples since 1990, and who has watched a great many perfectly wonderful people spend years in a waiting room they built themselves.

Where the Phrase Came From, and How It Gets Used Against You

“You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you” is one of those sentences that sounds so obviously true nobody ever checks it.

It isn’t true. Plenty of people who are shaky about themselves are deeply, properly loved, by partners and friends and their own children. Love is NOT a prize awarded for finishing your inner work.

What IS true is that how you feel about yourself shapes what you’ll tolerate, what you’ll ask for out loud, and what you’ll walk away from. That’s a real and serious point. But somewhere along the way it got turned into a permission slip, a standard you have to clear before you’re allowed to want company, and I watch that permission slip keep good people out of the game for years at a stretch.

The Eight Months I Watch People Lose

Kimmy Seltzer told this story on the podcast about herself, and it’s the most honest description of the trap I’ve heard.

After her marriage ended in Los Angeles she did exactly what she’d been trained to do as a therapist. Inside out. Personal therapy, friends, self-reflection. When people asked when she was going back out to date, she said what everybody says. I’m still working on myself.

Cut to eight months later.

Her own assessment is that it wasn’t work at all. She was sitting in analysis paralysis, not taking action, not really changing habits. She was wearing all black, which she calls her dark period, and she was still wearing the nursing bras. She wasn’t nursing any longer.

The turn didn’t come from more insight. It came from a shop. A personal shopper watched her gathering up another armful of black, handed her a red dress that looked about three sizes too small, and refused to take no for an answer. Honey, that is your color. That is your size. Kimmy grabbed it, squeezed into it, and that was that.

She calls it her red dress moment and she’s since built a TEDx talk around it. Then she ran a small experiment, wearing it to the coffee shop, walking the dog in it, and she started noticing men noticing her. The kicker, she says, is that she didn’t like it. She’d been wearing the black as a cloak so men wouldn’t see her, because deep down she was scared of being seen.

Here’s why I tell clients that story. The inside work and the outside work are not sequential, they’re symbiotic, and Kimmy’s whole practice rests on it. Waiting until the inside is finished before you’ll let yourself be seen is not a plan. It’s a very comfortable place to hide.

The 30-Second Exercise That Makes the Cruelty Audible

If you do one thing from this article, do this one.

Storey Pryor described it on the show. She got it at a women’s retreat and it is brutal in the best possible way.

Step one. Thirty seconds on a timer. Write down every negative thought that runs through your head about yourself. Don’t curate it. Hers included: I am old. It’s too late to start this. I’m too fat. I don’t look well. I don’t have the right credentials. I don’t have enough money.

Step two, and this is the part that does the work. Turn to the woman on your left and read your list to her face, as though you’re saying it about her.

Storey got as far as “you are ugly, you are fat” and broke down. She physically couldn’t finish. And the woman she was reading to was crying too, not because of the words, but because she was upset that anyone would talk to themselves that way.

That’s the whole point of the exercise. These sentences live silently in your head all day and never get tested. The second they have to be said out loud, to an actual face, you find out exactly what they are.

Storey’s follow-up was a rewrite rather than a deletion. She has big feet, size nine and a half, and she’d been embarrassed about them her whole life. Her dad was a professional baseball player. Now she says: these are my dad’s feet, and I love that they’ve walked me forty years.

You can’t really change anything in your life until you start loving the way you talk about yourself.

Storey Pryor

I’ll add my own inheritance, since I asked her to share hers. In my family the acceptable emotions were happy and calm. Anger and tears were not on the menu. My mother said it to me a million times: smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry all alone. She didn’t make it up, as it turns out. It’s a mangled version of the opening of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem from 1883, which somehow makes it worse, because it means half of America was raised on it. A rule like that doesn’t remove the feelings. It just removes the witnesses.

Why You Talk to Yourself That Way

Two of my guests handed me the two halves of this, and together they let people stop treating self-criticism as a personal failing.

Deekron Krikorian reframes imposter syndrome and people-pleasing as a subconscious survival mechanism rather than a character defect. For most of human history you needed the tribe to protect you and take you in, and if it didn’t, you were out on your own and in real trouble, because other tribes could harm you. So am I good enough, will they accept me still runs underneath everything, and it runs identically whether you’re on a first date or saying yes to a boss you should have said no to. That low-grade internal stress most people never notice is what manufactures both the perfectionism and the pleasing.

Kailen Rosenberg, twenty-eight years into her practice, supplies where the specific content comes from. Most people’s sense of who they are is inherited, a projection absorbed from parents, frequently from homes with addiction or trauma, rather than something arrived at through the actual experience of being loved. Most of us, she says, have never really learned or experienced love in a genuine way. So we see ourselves through the lens of our parents.

And there’s a measurable version too. Elizabeth Ashford cited a figure on air that by the time a woman is sixty she’ll have absorbed something like six million messages about what her body should look like. She stumbled over the number live, and there’s no study I can point you to, so take it as an experienced practitioner’s estimate rather than a statistic. Her follow-up is the part I’d keep anyway: given how much screen time we’re all getting, she thinks it feels low.

None of that is an excuse. All of it should take the shame out of it. That voice isn’t the truth about you. It’s a very old alarm system doing its job badly.

Where My Colleagues Disagree With Me

I want to be fair, because two people I respect enormously would argue with the headline on this page.

Kailen Rosenberg is unambiguous. She puts self-love work ahead of any matchmaking at all, and her position is that people need to do that work BEFORE they can expect to attract the right partner. Her reasoning is the inherited-self point above: without that foundation, a new relationship can only replay the old pattern.

Misty O’Hara said something similar to me from a completely different direction, that you have to love yourself and then everyone will love you, and that it’s absolutely true.

They may well be right. What I’d say back is that I’ve watched too many people take “do the work first” and turn it into a locked door. Kimmy lost eight months to it and she’s a therapist. The version I’ll defend is this: do the work, absolutely, and do it while you’re out among people, not instead of being out among people.

You can hold both. Kailen would tell you not to hand your sense of self to a stranger. I’d tell you not to wait until you’re finished to accept a coffee invitation. Neither of us is telling you to stay home.

How to Love Yourself First, Practically

Forget affirmations in the mirror. Here are six things that actually move the needle.

1. Swap the sentence, don’t fight the thought. Elizabeth Ashford’s version: instead of I’m so bloated or my arm looks so gross in that photo, try my legs look amazing today, I’m feeling so confident. Mine is slightly different and works for me. I acknowledge the thought, have a laugh over it, turn the volume down, and replace it with something I’m grateful to my body for.
2. Do the thirty seconds. The exercise above. With another person if you can bear it, out loud to yourself if you can’t.
3. Take one action a week that only makes sense if you matter. Book the appointment. Buy the thing that fits. Say no to the Saturday you didn’t want. Self-worth is built out of evidence, not out of decisions.
4. Change one outward thing. Not because appearance is the point, but because the two directions feed each other and outward is faster. Even the clothes you leave the house in change how you carry yourself, which changes how people respond, which changes how you feel. If you want somewhere concrete to start, here’s how you’re presenting yourself.
5. Watch how often you say “I.” This is an occupational observation. I read and edit my clients’ profiles myself, and if I see every paragraph starting with the word I, no. I will change that. And the more personal development somebody has done, the less of it there is to change. It’s a surprisingly good gauge.
6. Accept that happiness is a practice, not a state. That’s Storey’s line, not mine, and it landed hard when she said it. It is a daily practice to be happy, and with the happy comes the sad, the fear, the shame, the guilt and the disappointment. Those aren’t evidence that you’ve failed at self-love. They’re things to feel, say out loud, and keep walking with.

For a shorter piece specifically on beauty confidence and how it reads to men, I’ve written this one, though it’s a narrower subject than the one we’re on here.

Romance Yourself Before Anybody Else Does

Cat Cantrill gave me the framing I now use most with clients who are waiting.

People meet her and say, I’m not going to do this thing until I have a partner. And her question is simply: why are you waiting?

Her reasoning is the part that lands. You can’t drink from a well that’s empty — it’s an old saying but she’s the one who put it to me in a dating context, and it’s stuck. There has to be enough romance in your own life that when it finally arrives from outside you recognize it and say, yep, I want more of that. If you don’t know what romancing yourself is about, how would you even know what it feels like when somebody else brings it?

I’ll supply my own examples, since Cat didn’t. The trip you keep postponing. The nice bedding. The dinner you’d cook if somebody were coming. The table for one at a proper restaurant, which I promise you nobody in the room is judging.

And there’s a second, less sentimental benefit that Cat names. When people look at your life from the outside in and see somebody with an amazing life, that’s attractive in itself. Romance brings more romance. That isn’t a trick, it’s just visible.

The Part Nobody Says: Some of It Only Heals in Company

This is the correction I most want you to take away, and it comes from Storey, who has more right to say it than most.

She’s been through a great deal, a job loss after eight years, a two-year abusive relationship, the long recovery afterwards. And her honest report is that what’s been healing for her has been getting right back in and continuing to meet people.

Her reasoning is simple and I think it’s important. The things that were triggering for her before, she says, she’s learning about them now, through dating. They didn’t show up while she was alone. They showed up in CONTACT.

So the standard counsel, go away and fix yourself and then come back, gets it partly wrong. Time alone matters. But a whole category of this work is relational, and relational things are shy. They don’t appear in an empty room.

Which brings us back to the question at the top. Not am I finished? but can I do this while I’m out living? For almost everybody, the answer is yes.

How to Tell You’re Ready Enough to Date

Not perfect. Ready ENOUGH. Five honest checks.

• Can you hear your inner critic without obeying it? You don’t need it gone. You need to notice it talking.
• Can you get through an evening without auditioning? If every date is a performance review you’re conducting on yourself, you’ll be exhausted by the entrée.
• Do you have somewhere to put the feelings? A friend, a sister, a therapist, a group. My own sister has been that for me my whole life, and Storey said exactly the same thing about hers.
• Would you be all right if this particular person didn’t work out? Disappointed, sure. Undone, no.
• Do you know what you actually want? Which brings us to the last section.

If you’re coming out of something big, I’ve written separately about dating after divorce, about advice for widows and widowers, and about when to start dating again.

Your Three Critical Criteria

I’ve written about the mechanics of this exercise before, in my piece on dating deal breakers, so go there for the how. What I want to do here is tell you WHY it belongs in an article about loving yourself.

The exercise itself is short. Name three qualities you’d rather be alone for the rest of your life than live without. Three. Not a shopping list of fifteen, and NOT height.

When I ran it with Storey on air, what survived was humor, real intelligence, curiosity and a drive to keep growing, and above all character. Now, I put it slightly differently than most people do. For me it all sits under the umbrella of TRUSTWORTHY. If they say they’re going to pick you up from the hospital after your procedure, they’re going to be there. That’s the whole test, and it has never once let me down.

Wouldn’t we rather be single forever than partner with somebody who doesn’t have integrity, honesty and good character? Height, income, hairline. All negotiable. That isn’t, because it isn’t something you can coach into a person.

And notice what the exercise really is. Knowing your three is self-respect with a practical output. It’s what stops you talking yourself into something at month four. It’s also what stops you dismissing a good person over something that was never in your top three to begin with, which, if you want the uncomfortable version, is worth examining in my piece on whether you’re being too picky.

So. Do you have to love yourself first? No. But do the thirty seconds. Change one sentence. Take one action this week that only makes sense if you matter. And then go and meet people, and let the rest of it heal where it actually heals, which is out in company.

Look, I’m still doing this at 34 years in, and part of the reason is that I keep learning it myself. I was raised not to cry in front of anybody. I married a man who is so tight he squeaks, and who I met, of all places, when he sold me a membership at the Great Expectations video dating office in St. Louis, where I was working for the Ritz-Carlton and thought I knew everything about how the world worked. Thirty-three years later I’m still the one paying for the fancy hotels because life is too short for the Travelodge, and he’s still the one quietly picking up our son’s dental emergency without making a speech about it. We sorted none of that out in advance. We sorted it out while we were already in it, which is the only place any of us ever sorts anything out.

FAQs About Loving Yourself First

julieferman.com · Julie@JulieFerman.com · 805-371-9557