I have spent decades looking for love in other people’s eyes, searching for my worth in their approval, seeking my completion in their presence. I have scoured dating apps and coffee shops, convinced that somewhere out there was the person whose love would finally prove I was lovable, whose acceptance would silence the critic in my head who whispers “not enough, not worthy, not deserving.”

But the strangest thing about this external search is how it never occurred to me to look in the most obvious place: within myself.

I treated self-love like a luxury I could afford only after earning external validation. First, I thought, someone else must see value in me, then perhaps I could risk seeing it too. Self-acceptance felt presumptuous, like claiming a prize I hadn’t won, declaring myself worthy without proper certification from the outside world. How could I love myself when I had no evidence that I was lovable? Wouldn’t that be arrogant, delusional, unearned?

So I made other people’s love the measure of my lovability, their attention the proof of my worth, their desire the evidence of my desirability. I outsourced my self-worth to people who were often too busy managing their own insecurities to provide the constant validation I required. Every relationship became a referendum on whether I deserved to exist, every romantic interest a potential judge who would finally rule on my fundamental worthiness.

The exhaustion was immense: constantly performing to earn love, editing myself to maintain it, walking on eggshells to avoid losing it. I was a happiness beggar, going door to door asking others to give me what I refused to give myself. When someone showed interest, I clung desperately. When someone lost interest, I spiraled into self-hatred. My emotional state depended entirely on whether someone else had decided I was worth loving today.

I remember a relationship where I changed everything about myself to match what I thought she wanted. I pretended to like music I found boring, adopted opinions I didn’t believe, abandoned hobbies she found silly. And when she left anyway—not because of who I was but because of who I wasn’t being—I felt devastated. But the real tragedy wasn’t losing her. It was realizing I had lost myself in the process of trying to earn her love, that I had traded my authenticity for approval and ended up with neither.

But here’s what I learned: looking for love everywhere except within ourselves creates a peculiar paradox. The neediness for external validation repels the very love we’re seeking. People can sense desperation, the quality of someone who needs their approval more than they need their own. The hunger for validation leaks out in subtle ways—the way we laugh too hard at their jokes, agree too quickly with their opinions, check our phones obsessively for their messages, panic when they take too long to respond.

The cruel irony is that the love we find before we love ourselves is always conditional, always fragile, always subject to the other person’s moods and limitations. We end up with relationships built on mutual neediness rather than mutual wholeness, love that demands rather than gives, connection that depletes rather than nourishes. Two people desperately trying to fill the void in themselves by extracting worth from each other—it’s a mathematics that never works, a transaction where both parties end up bankrupt.

Maybe the external search is really just elaborate avoidance—a way to delay the difficult work of building a loving relationship with ourselves. It’s easier to blame our lovelessness on others’ inability to see our worth than to confront our own inability to recognize it. As long as I could tell myself the problem was finding the right person, I didn’t have to face the harder truth: that the problem was how I saw myself, how I treated myself, how I spoke to myself in the privacy of my own mind.

I was kinder to strangers than to myself. I offered friends compassion I denied myself. I forgave others for mistakes I couldn’t forgive in myself. The internal voice that narrated my life was cruel and relentless, pointing out every flaw, magnifying every failure, dismissing every success as luck or accident. I wouldn’t speak to an enemy the way I spoke to myself, yet I couldn’t imagine any other way of being.

What if the love we’re seeking in others is actually the love we’re refusing to give ourselves? What if the acceptance we crave externally is the acceptance we’re withholding internally? What if we’re searching the world for something we already possess but have never learned to access? These questions terrified me because they suggested that I had agency, that my lovelessness wasn’t about the world’s failure to recognize my worth but about my refusal to recognize it myself.

Learning to love myself felt impossibly difficult at first, like trying to speak a language I’d never heard. How do you love yourself when you’ve spent decades cataloging your inadequacies? How do you offer yourself compassion when self-criticism has become your default mode? How do you treat yourself with kindness when you believe kindness must be earned through perfection?

I started small. Instead of berating myself for mistakes, I practiced saying “I’m learning.” Instead of dismissing compliments with self-deprecating jokes, I practiced saying “thank you.” Instead of comparing myself to others’ highlight reels, I practiced focusing on my own growth. Instead of waiting for someone else to validate my feelings, I practiced validating them myself—acknowledging that my emotions were real and legitimate even when they were inconvenient or uncomfortable.

The shift happened slowly, almost imperceptibly. I noticed I was less desperate for others’ approval because I had started giving myself approval. I was less devastated by rejection because my worth no longer depended on others’ acceptance. I was less afraid of being alone because I had finally become someone I could stand to be with. The relationships I formed started feeling different—lighter, more authentic, more sustainable—because I was no longer asking them to carry weight they couldn’t support.

Tonight I want to turn the search inward, to look for love in the one place I’ve been avoiding: in my own heart, in my own acceptance, in my own willingness to treat myself with the kindness I offer others. Not because I’ve earned it or proven myself worthy, but because worthiness isn’t something you earn—it’s something you already have, something you’ve always had, something you just need to recognize.

Because maybe the external search ends when the internal search begins. Maybe the love we’ve been seeking was never missing—we just weren’t looking in the right direction. Maybe home isn’t a person we find but a relationship we build with ourselves, a gentle acceptance of our flawed, complicated, perfectly imperfect humanity. Maybe the journey ends not when someone finally sees us but when we finally see ourselves, not when someone chooses us but when we choose ourselves, not when we become lovable but when we realize we always were.