The key is being aware of what’s happening in your intimate experiences. Healthy relationships are where the individuals love themselves first so they can exchange love with each other fairly. If someone in the relationship love is absent the other will be left feeling drained.
When we agree to enter into relationship it’s an agreement to throw away our self-serving desires for the purpose of working together. Throwing away self-serving desires is not throwing away your self-care and personal growth. It’s instead opening up and extending yourself to the other person to work with you to grow and vice versa while still maintaining your own growth.
Remember depending on another is not the same as a dependency, but sometimes the two are easily confused and without proper balance, it is easy to build a dependency or either become overly independent. But being overly independent also puts a strain on a relationship. This type of independence can stem from the fear of losing yourself within the relationship. This fear brings about erratic behavior and subconscious sabotage in order to advert losing yourself.
Your first relationship is with yourself. In order to cultivate the relationship with yourself, you must first understand you are not your learned behaviors or beliefs, you are not the constructs of your learned love behaviors, you are not your personality but your personality is the way in which you are currently choosing to express your perceptions.
Love is its own reward. We do not have to worry about what other people think about us. We can never feel alone or isolated when we understand that it is impossible for love to leave our side. Love is all around us.