Is It Bad to Love Myself?

Why are we socialized to think that somehow love of self and love of others are in conflict? That is one of the questions that we discussed at The Free Store on Tuesday morning. Many of us have been raised in conservative religious traditions that have told us that we have to love others more than we love ourselves and that self-love is bad and sinful.

We looked at a text in Ephesians 5 that makes the point that "the man should love his wife as he loves his own body." Most of us know how to love our own bodies because we instinctively protect ourselves from harm (the characters in the movie Jackass seem to be the exception!) We wondered if people that stop caring for themselves physically have lost their ability to love in some way.

The text also says that "the one who loves his wife loves himself." We talked about how this only makes sense if the two are connected in some deep, mysterious, almost mystical way. We agreed that this could idea be extended to relationships beyond a husband and wife. It is as if the other person is an extension of the self and so the way that we treat that person is actually the way that we are treating ourselves.

We wondered if maybe loving ourselves and loving others is really just the two sides of the same coin. Our friend George said that before he went to prison he didn't care about anyone else and was very hard inside. We were fascinated by this because George is one of the most sensitive and artistic people we know. We talked about how it might be possible to extend our circle of concern ever outward to embrace more and more people recognizing that every person is part of us in some mystical but very real way.

Interestingly, at the end of our discussion George pulled a coin out of his pocket that had heads on both sides! Maybe that coin was a message to us that only emphasizing self love or other love is really a distortion of the authentic two-sided coin of genuine love. We don't think there is any real tension between loving ourselves and loving others. When we love another person we are loving ourselves. And in loving ourselves we learn to love others.