The article writer missed the point of the philosophy. It's an upbeat way of saying that if you don't like yourself or haven't learned how to actually love someone, you're always going to fail at having a good relationship with anybody else. I was married to someone who was not his own best friend. It ended up being hell to be around him.

I don't buy "love yourself and people will automagically love you" but I do buy "be the sort of person you want to be with". Of course ... that won't work either, unless you have a realistic and pragmatic notion of the sort of person you want to be with. If you have ridiculous "standards" then not only will you never find anyone who meets those fantasy standards, you'll be a frigging hypocrite because there would be no way you could meet those standards either.

Agree.... It just happens... or it doesn't. Sometimes one is harder than the other, either way

Love this article! It puts into cogent words my underlying feeling of pssssh when seeing that "love thyself first" mantra trope being trotted out.

I am still learning that love is not something you have to earn. Thanks for the post.

Interesting read but it seems to have a confused the understanding of the intent to want to love one's self first. Kinda like someone who wants to a mixed martial art for self defense but is looked like their someone who wants to learn to beat people up. The differences between the intrinsic approach and the extrinsic approach were described slightly but the real value to the differences must be understood by reasoning of wanting to become self aware. As stated in this article, we are bombarded with cultural assessments of our self worth through external validation. Attention, money, fame, body image, sexual promiscuity, ECT... Self love is learning to find the value of one's existentialism without the external "validators". Learning to love one's self is like learning to learn to avoid a punch in the face from life. Without an understanding of what you truly want, you will continue to look for it in the wrong places. We all have our journeys to live but we forget, not everyone had good parents who showed them how to love themselves or good examples of how to love others. I really did appreciate the article though. Interesting perspective.