I’m a chocolate girl. I love dark chocolate with pretzels or nuts. I make my own chocolate bark with those things, and it is yummy!  I try not to eat it every day, but according to the latest health studies, dark chocolate is good for us.  So, what could be better than that?

The idea for this blog post came to me the other day while I was thinking about what the most important thing could be in our lives. I came up with love.

We could have all the money we ever wanted, enough to shop every single day, go on lavish vacations, eat the finest foods, drive the most expensive car, and live wherever we want, but if we don’t love ourselves, how can we ever be satisfied?

Life is Made Up of Experiences

Sure, some would disagree with me and say that all those things are great, and they would be very happy with an abundance of money. But think about this: what would your experiences be like if nothing ever satisfied a need within you, and deep down, you were miserable? Would life feel like it’s a blessing? Maybe. We all have different priorities as to what is important to us.

What Love Can Do

I do believe, though, that loving ourselves is the key that unlocks so many doors. It helps us be confident, kind, and have faith in ourselves, and we can feel genuine happiness. Without happiness, we’re like fish out of water, flapping around on shore, gasping for water in our gills. We require happiness to function at our optimal level.

Loving ourselves is what heals us. When we love ourselves, we want to be healthy. We won’t complain about our aches and pains, but we understand that they’re a part of living and can be alleviated with exercise and patience.  I’ll mention my aches and pains to my husband because I want him to know what I’m going through, but I don’t wallow in it. My mind goes right to healing thoughts because I believe I deserve great health. And I do feel better.

Loving ourselves is the precursor to having a healthy relationship with others. It is the necessary foundation of a happy, healthy romantic partnership. If we don’t love ourselves, all sorts of issues can arise in relationships, like feeling like we don’t have a voice or losing ourselves. There may be feelings of jealousy, resentment, or anger, or the relationship may feel forced if you’re in it to avoid being alone. And when you don’t love yourself, you can’t trust in someone loving you or having your best interest at heart.

The Benefits of Love

You’ll know when you truly love yourself. You feel it. You like who you are. You like being alone with your thoughts. You are creative and spontaneous and trust yourself to make good decisions. It feels good when you wake up in the morning because you’re psyched about the day ahead, knowing you’re going to do what you want to do.

Loving another is just as important, but first we must love ourselves. That creates a balanced life. Loving ourselves means we prioritize ourselves when setting boundaries that help us achieve happiness. That means being true to ourselves if we need space or don’t want to (or can’t) do something asked of us. It’s okay to say no. It really is. We’re not responsible for others’ reactions to our planned lives. We get to choose what is right for us.

And speaking of a life, we only get one, and it seems it goes by really fast. I’m working on slowing things down, but it’s proving to be tough. So, why not live a happy life?

When we love ourselves, we live a happy life because it’s what we choose. We make ourselves happy. There’s no need for someone else to come along and fix everything; we’ve got it figured out and need to stick with the plan.  And the relationships that we do have are more fulfilling because we’ve already filled the cup with our love for ourselves. The love we share is then the delicious whipped cream on top. (Can you tell where my mind is at? I do like sweets!)

Start with Who You Are

To love ourselves, we need to learn who we are and what we want from life. Once we figure that out, we can honor ourselves every single day by being who we are, doing what we want, and treating ourselves with kindness and respect. Then guess what? Others treat you with kindness and respect because you won’t tolerant any less.

If you care about living a happy life, take some time with yourself and figure out what you want from life. Write it down. Seeing it in writing does help clarify things. Once you do that, then you’ll know how you want to live your life, and the more we live how we want, the more love we feel for ourselves because we aren’t abandoning ourselves anymore.

Thank you for reading this. I am spreading my love through these words.

To loving ourselves,

Francesca

 

 

 

Written by a human for humans.

© 2025 FrancescaME | All rights reserved.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for the development of generative AI and machine learning language models.