One of the great and slightly strange dangers of falling in love with someone is how we
may respond the day they start to love us back. Some of the reasons we fall in love
with people is because we long to escape from ourselves into the embrace of a person who
appears as beautiful, perfect and accomplished as we feel ourselves to be flawed, dumb and
mediocre. But what if such a being were one day turn around and love us back? Nothing
could discredit them faster. How could they be as divine as we'd hoped for when they have
the bad taste to approve of someone like us? It turns out that one of the central requirements
of a good relationship is a degree of affection for ourselves; built up over the years, largely
in childhood. We need a legacy of being deserving of love in order not to respond very obtusely
to the affections granted to us by adult partners. Without a decent amount of self-love, the
love of another person will always prove sickening and misguided – and we will self-destructively
– though unconsciously – set out to repel or disappoint it. It will simply feel more
normal and therefore comfortable to be disliked or ignored when that is mostly what we have
known. If we are not wholly convinced of our own lovability, receiving affection can appear
like being bestowed a prize for an accomplishment we don’t feel we ever earned. People unfortunate
enough to fall in love with self-hating types must brace themselves for the recriminations
due to false flatterers. There is an old joke made by Groucho Marx about not deigning
to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member. We laugh at the Marxist
position because of its absurd contradictions: how is it possible that we should both wish
to join a club, and yet lose that wish as soon as it comes true? Why wouldn’t we just
be happy to have been allowed into this club? The answer lies in self-hatred; because for
many of us, being accepted into a grand and beautiful club doesn’t feel like what our
inner psyches have been shaped to accept. We wonder how we can continue to believe in
a club, or indeed a beloved now that they believe in us. There is usually a troubling
Marxist moment in every relationship, a moment when it becomes clear that love is going to
be reciprocated; that we won’t simply admire someone from afar without hope of mutuality.
The way the crisis is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred in our own characters. If self-hatred
gains the upper hand, then the one who is being loved back will declare that the beloved
(on some excuse or other) is just not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating
with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, then both partners may accept
that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but instead of how
lovable they have themselves turned out to be. It emerges that knowing how to love
ourselves a little can be one of the kindest and therefore most romantic things we can
ever learn to do for our partners.