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IT’S TIME TO SPEAK YOUR
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ANGUAGE
Looking for love, experiencing heartbreak, or embracing yourself, practicing your own love language could be the key. By PAYTON BIERK
Whether you’ve been through a breakup yourself and a friend has granted you some words of wisdom or you’ve been held hostage by tarot card readers plaguing your social media feed, you’ve definitely heard the advice, “You can’t love someone else until you love yourself first.” Like me, you’ve probably reluctantly shrugged off this cliché, but perhaps, there’s really some truth behind it? As we’ve all been told, the relationship that you have with yourself is by far the most important one you’ll ever have. So, if our relationships all start and end with ourselves, it only makes sense that we should be practicing the kind of love we crave from others on ourselves first and foremost, right?
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Maybe the key to any successful relationship really is loving yourself in the ways you want to be loved — and for those just getting out of relationships or not currently in one, you could just survive some heartbreak or find yourself in the process. Of course, it’s a lot easier said than done to put yourself first. Redirecting focus and love onto yourself can often feel selfish and even trivial, but it’s quite necessary for starting to “speak” your love language. So, why might you feel a bit reluctant? “Culturally, we’re taught to be empathetic to others and to not be self-centered, so there’s already a little bit of judgment there,” explains Jay Choi, a Couples Therapist and Licensed Psychologist at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But rather than beating ourselves up over being “selfcentered,” why not try to look at it from another perspective?
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IT TOOK TWO YEARS AND FOUR WORDS for my relationship to end. “I love you too.” And that was it — then came the waves of advice...
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