It Takes a Long Time to Make Love with Someone Who Hates Themselves

Summary

The article discusses the challenges and dynamics of loving someone who struggles with self-hatred and offers guidance on how to navigate these relationships for both the partner and the self-hating individual.

Abstract

The article titled "It Takes a Long Time to Make Love with Someone Who Hates Themselves" delves into the emotional complexities of being in a relationship with a person who has deep-seated self-loathing. It describes such a relationship as draining and unsustainable, likening it to pushing a car with no gas. The author suggests that individuals who find themselves in these situations may be emotionally wounded themselves or derive a sense of purpose from caretaking. The article emphasizes the importance of healing one's own emotional wounds to avoid inflicting pain on others and outlines options for both the partner and the self-hating individual to move towards healthier relationships. These options include seeking professional help, recognizing dysfunctional patterns, and learning to love oneself.

Opinions

The author believes that trying to love someone who hates themselves is emotionally taxing and ultimately unsustainable, akin to a car with no gas.
It is implied that individuals who are drawn to those with self-hatred may have their own emotional issues or a subconscious desire to be a caretaker.
The article suggests that people often stay in unsatisfying relationships because they are also emotionally wounded and may confuse caretaking with love.
There is a strong opinion that everyone has a moral obligation to address their own emotional baggage to prevent the perpetuation of pain in relationships.
The author provides stark options for partners of self-hating individuals, highlighting the necessity of therapy or coaching to correct unhealthy relationship patterns.
For those who hate themselves, the article presents various coping mechanisms, from leveraging self-loathing to attract caretakers to self-medicating with various substances, ultimately advocating for self-help as the path to healthy intimacy.
The author expresses that healing is often avoided due to its difficulty, yet it becomes inevitable when all other alternatives have been exhausted.
The article encourages readers to seek help proactively rather than waiting until they are in severe emotional distress.

Healthy alternatives to self-hatred.

Have you ever tried to love someone who hates themselves? It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Like swimming upstream. Like a trick birthday candle made of self-loathing. An emotional sinkhole. A relationship with a high interest rate.

Trying to love someone and continuously remind them that they are lovable is both taxing and unsustainable. That’s a car with no gas in it. You can’t keep pushing that thing around like Fred Flintstone. It gets old and unsatisfying pretty quickly. One can only stay with a person like this to the extent that they are emotionally wounded as well.

Are you in love with their tremendous potential? Their outsides but not their insides? Their future but not their present? Are you “helping” them? Do you get a sense of purpose or self-esteem by being such a great partner to this person?

Have you ever been that person?

I’ve been on both sides of this toxic emotional playground. Neither one is any less awful.

What Can You Do?

Regardless of what side of the field you play, you’ve probably got some healing to do. Not in a judgmental “something wrong with you” kind of way. Just in a “your parents did the best they could with what they had” kind of way.

We all have luggage. I believe it’s our job to unpack it, so we don’t have to shoulder that shit across the finish line like some kind of unintentional 90-year ruck. Also know that carrying toxic shame, self-hatred, and unhealed wounds around with you all day is not only harmful to you but also everyone around you. For sure.

I believe we each have a moral obligation to follow the breadcrumbs of our dysfunctional behaviors and attitudes back to the source (usually our childhoods) so we can heal and stop unwittingly inflicting our pain on the rest of humanity.

If Your Partner Hates Themselves, These Are Your Options:

Tough it out in a probably unsatisfying relationship with someone who will most likely not get better, especially if self-loathing is getting them the love and attention they want. This relationship will either suck forever or end.

Leave them and go find another partner with the same problems because you haven’t addressed the underlying issue of being attracted to wounded people. This relationship will also suck.

Get a therapist or a relationship coach to help you identify and correct the dysfunctional coping strategy that involves getting your emotional needs met by caretaking sick people and calling it love. Then find an equal partner and have a healthy and satisfying relationship.

If You Hate Yourself, These Are Your Options:

Leverage your chronic self-loathing to attract codependent caretakers and work the dysfunctional relationship circuit.

Get a dog or find some other non-relationship way to get your emotional needs met.

Self-medicate through compulsive use of work, sex, drugs, alcohol, etc.

Get help, learn to love yourself, then discover the joys of healthy intimacy and true love.

Notice that the healthy option is usually the last one on the list. Healing is hard. Avoiding it is easy. Often healing is not a choice; it’s just what remains when you run out of other alternatives.

Most people need to be pretty badly mangled before they ask for help. I hope this article will inspire you to skip to the end of your list. Forego all of that needless suffering and get busy living.

*The title of this article is a line from one of Buddy Wakefield’s poems, Information Man. He is my favorite poet of all time. Look him up.

Adam Murauskas is a relationship coach and writer. He and his wife Rebecca abandoned their careers and moved to Panamá in 2019 to pursue their passions for writing and helping people heal full time. You can find him on Instagram @fixyourpicker where he posts original content and microblogs daily. Take the free relationship quiz at FixYourPicker.com.