“You have to learn to love yourself first, before you can love someone else”
I disagree.
Love is about giving. There is no condition of in what direction love has to go first in order to go next.
Even worst; loving oneself first borders with egoism, and the division line is too blurry to easily prevent passing to the other field. In the way of loving oneself first, we can too easily become selfish and egoist, reducing (if not nullifying) our capabilities to give true love to someone else.
So far the only reason I’ve heard in favor of the cliché phrase is: “But how can you love someone if you don’t love yourself first?”
That’s not an explanation or a logical concept to demonstrate that one has to love oneself first in order to be able to love someone else. It is just a “secondary” phrase created to accompany the first!
In my concepts, you don’t need to love yourself first in order to give love to others. Let me give you an example.
Let’s suppose a situation. A group of people is trapped in a 10th floor with a bomb ready to explode. Nobody can escape, so everybody will die. Then you have one person who doesn’t love herself. She even can hate herself and be unable to get to terms with her life. But she sees all the people around will die, and she sees the fear and the sadness in them. So she decides to grab the bomb and jump through the window, to make the bomb explode in mid-air. Everybody would be safe, but she will die.
Like many people, she might hate her life and herself, but that doesn’t necessarily means she wants to die! Yet she sacrifices herself for others. She gave love to others, even when she didn’t love herself.
Loving oneself is giving love from oneself to oneself. Love going from us, to come back to us.
At the other hand, giving love to someone else is giving love from us to the other. Love goes from us to the other person. It is going in a straight line from us, not in a circular line from us. Those are two different directions love can go, so those are two different kind of love. So giving love to someone (loving someone) has nothing to do with giving love to oneself (loving oneself).
So there is no need to love oneself first in order to be able to love someone else. The cliché phrase is wrong, or is a very easy way to justify selfishness and egoism!
My personal perspective
Raul
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