The Most Important Ingredient in a Successful Relationship (you’ll never guess it)

The most important ingredient in a successful relationship

When relationships end people tell their close friends and family who rally around them and give them tea, biscuits and normally the same bit of advice.

“You should spend some time by yourself before starting anything new” or words to that effect.

This is normally followed by the person ignoring this and jumping at the first person who shows them a bit of attention or ankle, and before they know it they find themselves in another relationship which doesn’t have the best chance of success again.

To be clear, I’m not saying that if you haven’t spent any time alone then your next relationship is doomed and you can still increase your chances of it being a success by doing one very complex yet simple thing.

Love yourself.

Let’s get into why.

Why the time single is so important

Relationships end for all sorts of reasons, people grow apart, people cheat, circumstances can force them apart or it can be amicable but regardless of the why it’s always going to result in a massive change.

You will suddenly find yourself in a situation where you are by yourself, you’re not bound to anyone else, you lose any responsibilities you may have had to them, you might have a lot more free time, you might well just have a lot more space.

This is the ideal time for you to discover who you are outside of the relationship.

The perfect relationship would have both partners in a place of complete acceptance of themselves, complete acceptance of their partners, and the ability to communicate easily and honestly with each other.

The truth is that they are frequently far more tangled and complicated than that and it normally is hindered by the fact that people find it difficult to accept or even love themselves (for clarity we’re not talking vanity and ego here).

When acceptance from either or both sides is missing the relationship can easily become unbalanced, it is these imbalances that over the course of time become more and more precarious until they eventually cause genuine issues within the relationship.

That isn’t what anyone wants for their relationships, we go into relationships hoping and perhaps even expecting them to last. No-one comes into something thinking “well, I hope this goes well for 2-3 years before falling apart.”

The best thing that you can do to ensure that either your current or next relationship is to achieve self-acceptance/self-love.

That is why this time by yourself is so important – it gives you the amazing opportunity to find out who you really are outside of a relationship, what you really want from a relationship and the chance to love yourself for who you really are.

If you are already in a relationship then you can give it the best chance of being a success by taking the time to do the same.

What can happen with dating if you don’t love yourself

Let’s say that you don’t love yourself or even accept certain things about yourself – you’re well aware of your flaws, you fight against them and deeply wish they were different.

You meet someone who you like, everything about them seems perfect, you spend time together, you laugh, you dine, you have sex, everything is going great.

That is until you realise something dreadful about them.

They like you, a lot.

But hang on a minute, you’re this deeply flawed creature, you have this and that and the other wrong with you. You’re ugly/stupid/clumsy/inelegant etc.

You’re awful.

It dawns on you that this amazing person likes a dreadfully flawed person.

If they can like someone so flawed then they must also have flaws as well, they must be broken, they must have something wrong with them.

How could someone perfect ever like someone like you?

They mustn’t be perfect.

They must be pushed away.

And this is what tends to happen, your own doubts about yourself make you doubt the veracity or belief in someone’s affection for you.

And the alternative? Where you have self acceptance

You accept, like or even love yourself.

You start seeing someone and they like you.

Of course they like you, you’re awesome.

You like yourself, they like you, now it’s up to you to decide whether you like them.

And perhaps they’ll freak out because they don’t like themselves and they fall into the aforementioned pushing away scenario but that isn’t in your control.

The impact of missing self-love in a relationship

When self-love or self-acceptance is missing from a relationship imbalances are created as I mentioned before but what impact does this have?

If you’re in a relationship and you love your partner but you don’t love yourself then you’re already positioning yourself as “lesser than” them.

This positioning creates a dynamic where you can or will feel as if you always have something to prove, you always have to do that little bit more to impress your partner, you allow your boundaries to be pushed, bent or broken in order to facilitate this.

So, the relationship continues, and you get on well, you still laugh, love, have sex but at what cost to your self-worth. What are you doing to your mental health when you find that you’re having to sacrifice things which you hold dearly in order to just maintain the relationship?

There will be times when you’re pushing yourself, or being pushed too far, the fights break out, the arguments, the disagreements and after this flashpoint and promises to make changes nothing does change because you still don’t love yourself.

From your partner’s perspective they have you running around doing everything you can to make them happy – “wow, what an amazing person, how lovely are they?” is what they will think initially.

Later on maybe they see you going constantly above and beyond what’s necessary to please you and reassure you don’t need to do that.

They try to help you with your issues.

Oh shit, they’ve realised how flawed you are, you’ve got to do more to hide it!

Your boundaries have crumbled, your core values now being questioned and your self-worth dangling by a thread.

You love your partner but how can they love a piece of shit like you? They must be broken.

You start to look for flaws in them, and sure enough they, like everyone else, have them.

The cracks start to appear, the arguments become more frequent and things eventually end.

But what about the other important relationship elements

It might well be that you’re hearing this thinking “what about honesty, loyalty, respect, passion, communication etc”

Well let’s have a dive into each thing that people tend to think is the most important element of a relationship.

Honesty

Self-love means that you’ve got the ability to be 100% honest with yourself therefore it’s easy to be 100% honest with a partner.

Loyalty

A person who has mastered self-love will only let themselves be in a relationship which actually serves them and their needs fully so won’t need to look elsewhere once they’ve committed.

Respect

I think you’ll struggle to find someone more respectful than the type of person who has learnt to respect the most difficult person of all, themselves.

Passion

The person who has mastered self-love knows what they want, knows what they like to do and likes to have a fire lit in their belly and will likely want you to feel exactly the same!

Communication

People who have got to the point of self-love will have been through intense, honest conversations with themselves and maybe even a therapist, they don’t get there through luck, they get there through communication.

I’m sure there are loads more examples of this that I could go through but I think you’re getting the idea that all the elements that you’d want in a relationship are a bi-product of self-love.

Take the time to find self-love

When you feel good enough, when you accept yourself and when you know that you’ll never feel lesser than it changes everything.

With self-love in place you know exactly where your boundaries are, you recognise that they are red lines which don’t get crossed for any reason. It puts you in a position where you’re easily capable of recognising that you are never less than an equal in a relationship and more importantly that if anyone tried to do anything to suggest that you aren’t then you’d stand up for yourself.

When you’ve just come out of a relationship it can take some time to analyse and realise where things went wrong and what position you found yourself in with regards to the dynamic. Without taking the time to assess and do some reflecting on the relationship you will likely enter the next relationship you have in the same position because that’s what you’ve learnt your place to be.

By taking the time to accept yourself, be grateful for what’s happened to you, to recognise what you control in life and to eventually love yourself you will enter your next relationship in the healthiest way that you possibly can, and that’s what will give the relationship the very best chance of success.

If you’d like to have a chat about how you can start loving yourself then click the button below and book in for a completely free exploratory call with me.