Self-love; do you have to love yourself in order to love others - Term Paper Example

Love has been the prescribed remedy for most of the problems that people confront with in their daily life. Love was interpreted by many; we all experience it, share it, long for it; yet know little about what actually love is. Generally, people think that they all have self love. The evidence they find for this belief is that they defend themselves, they enjoy, they work and earn etc. Yet many of them are not able to give an immediate answer to the question whether they love themselves. The reason must be that they have seldom attempted to analyze whether they have self-love, despite, many of them are so familiar with the Christian rule “love others as you love yourself.

” (Mt: 22:39). Question whether we should love ourselves in order to love others is a disputable one. Some are of the opinion that it does not necessarily require self love in order to love others. People of the other view believe that loving others without having self-love is pseudo love because what people find bad with themselves, obviously find more with others. So the love they express toward others is only a short term pretension. Among the both concepts the latter seems to be more justifiable.

One of the definitions goes like this; “Loving self means being real and accepting every aspect of ourselves. We are having a human experience in a unique human body. We are not having an idealistic saintly experience. We are human we get angry, we feel sad, we love, we are selfish, we are generous, we lie, we hide…. But we must embrace them all if we want to experience love of self.” (Isha, 2008 p.58). The self love begins with accepting oneself in spite of all the negative factors of one’s character and limitations.

An individual can not wait for becoming a perfect character to begin loving himself. In spite of all the bad habits and unworthiness we all have certain virtues within our souls. According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics (Aristotle, Browne &