Thoughts on Love 5: The Great Self-Love Paradox

Nathaniel:                   Sire, do you like yourself?

Prince Edward:          What’s not to like?

Enchanted (2007)

Well, I’ve talked about us loving God. I’ve talked about God loving us. I’ve talked about us loving one another. What am I missing?

Hint: self-love doesn’t literally come in cups. Just in case you weren’t sure.

A little while ago, I was browsing Icon for Hire’s videos on YouTube¹ and, through the power of the suggestions list on the right-hand side, ended up watching an episode of the REL Show (lead singer Ariel’s vlog channel) entitled ‘How to stop hating yourself: An honest conversation with Gala Darling’.² Less than a minute into the video, Ariel says to Gala, whom she is interviewing, “And one of the things that I am so excited about with you is you’re one of the only people I can find actively speaking about self-love.”

In terms of what Ariel meant by ‘actively speaking’, that may be true – but perhaps I just move in different online circles to her, because it seems to me as if people talk about self-love quite a lot. I have encountered quotations related to the theme plastered across vaguely inspirational-looking backgrounds; articles taking its importance for granted; even advertisements for such a thing as a ‘feminist self-love course’.³ The accepted position seems to be that self-love is a Good Thing. Indeed, Ariel and Gala spend the rest of their YouTube interview extolling its virtues and detailing how to attain to it.

Perhaps you’re picking up on a slightly cynical tone on my part. This is deliberate. I have long found the concept of self-love problematic, and, if you’ll give me a moment to explain before quitting this page in disgust, I’ll attempt to do so.

The trouble is that the way self-love seems to be understood is as a high opinion of oneself – liking one’s own characteristics. Prince Edward from Enchanted, as per my opening quote, would seem to be a veritable paragon of this kind of self-love – but surely he tips over into arrogance? He is, admittedly, rather endearing with it, and handles the loss of his hero/male lead role far better than, say, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, as I discussed a few weeks ago – but nevertheless, he is kidding himself to think that every aspect of himself is entirely likeable. For all he is literally a fairy-tale prince, he is frequently elitist (referring to a group of bus passengers as ‘peasants’), violent (on the point of dispatching Robert with a sword until Giselle steps in), and self-obsessed (assuming the message Pip is trying to convey to him through elaborate mime must be some compliment to himself)⁴ – not, I think, qualities which many of us would perceive as likeable.

I simply don’t consider it an option to entertain that kind of self-love, a refusal to acknowledge anything bad about oneself. The Bible is clear beyond doubt that all of us as human beings are deeply flawed: Romans 3:9-20, for instance, contains a damning compendium of Old Testament remarks on how utterly godless and riddled with wrongdoing we all are.⁵ Indeed, to admit that one is a sinner in need of a saviour is very much key to being a follower of Jesus, who, you may well be aware, takes rather a dim view of people exalting themselves.⁶

Still, the way self-love tends to be talked about in the contexts in which I’ve encountered it, it’s not an attitude people are likely to already be abundant in, but rather one which must be determinedly cultivated. This actually raises another problem, because I really tend to feel that the last thing I need to be encouraged to do is spend more time focussing on myself, to the detriment of God and other people.

Focussing on myself, was the idea I was going for with this one. The selfie stick seems to me like a particularly pointless exercise in narcissism.

So what’s the solution? Simply not loving ourselves? I might, not too long ago, have been tempted to defend that position. And then, this summer, I was staying with some people in rural mid Devon while helping with a church holiday club, and happened one evening to pluck a book called The Teenage Survival Kit, clearly hailing from some point in the last couple of decades before the twenty-first century hit, off their shelves. Despite no longer being a teenager, I found a lot of really very helpful stuff in it, including a section where the author, Pete Gilbert, makes it quite clear that he had no time for lack of self-love in the name of piety – after all, God loves us, and who are we to think our judgement is somehow superior to his?⁷

And here we find the key. God loves us, but not, as I hope I have successfully established in previous weeks, based on any appealing attribute of ours. If we love ourselves because we like our own qualities, we’re only applying a peanut-butter-milkshake level of love to ourselves – in which case, it’s really no wonder, in view of the deep imperfection that characterises each of us, that it’s such a difficult thing to do. If, on the other hand, I’m trying to follow the way God does things, the kind of love I should have for myself is unconditional, and selfless, and based not on what I have done but what God has done for me.

This is, I think, a rather odd thing to get one’s head round: how does one love oneself selflessly? How can something as totally to do with myself as self-love find its basis in someone other than myself? But this is itself the trick. God’s love is infinitely better and stronger and more wonderful than ours can ever be, so the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is in fact to allow ourselves to be loved by him. And, since, loving us as he does, God is certain to have our best interests at heart, we can be sure that loving ourselves will also involve doing what he says we should – which, oddly enough, heavily involves loving him, and loving other people.⁸

And hence my cynicism about the kind of self-love that most conversations on the subject seem to advocate, including – sorry, Ariel; I’m still a huge fan of your work – the one between Ariel and Gala that I mentioned above. No kind of love that we generate within ourselves is going to have a fraction of the brilliance of that which God freely offers us. In a completely delightful paradox, the best, most effective form of self-love is to leave aside the self and pour all one’s energy into loving God and loving other people.

It sounds pretty radical. Counter-cultural. Counter-intuitive. And yes, it’s all those things, because sin is so deeply ingrained in us, and all sin is selfishness. But this kind of love is what God ultimately designed us for, and, though none of us will manage it perfectly this side of the end of the world, in the meantime, we are, with his help, to aim to get closer to it, and be more like him as a result.

Footnotes

¹ Icon for Hire is my favourite band. Not only do I find its songs melodically and instrumentally compelling, but the lyrics are incredibly clever and just say things that it doesn’t feel as if anyone else in music is saying. Take, for instance, ‘Iodine’, from the band’s first album, Scripted – “I say I want to be healthy, but I turn up the noise. / The IV drips a steady stream of poison. / I think I’m just in love with the feeling: / Break my bones so I can feel them healing” – or ‘Pop Culture’, from its second and most recent, self-titled, album, whose chorus begins: “Pop culture does nothing for me. / The American Dream, mainstream, just bores me, / ’Cause I’m not like you, I’m immune, I’m immune: / Say it over and over until it comes true.” I just think it’s utterly brilliant stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpR4KGjzlCA&index=6&list=PLMfa-IfzrufpAp8paxZSTqAY30eI9J3Rs. 

² Here’s the link if you’d like to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urF-bMJGhcM. 

³ I’m sorry not to be able to footnote any of the given examples properly, and would definitely scrawl ASSERTION in the margin if I were marking this post as an essay, but hopefully, dear reader, you’re prepared to forgive me for not spending hours tracking down such briefly-encountered items, and take this minor point on trust, or comparison with your own experience.

⁴ Not the best quality video, but it’s such a funny scene, it doesn’t really matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XyNkyHjqSY. 

⁵ Well, I say ‘damning’ – read the rest of the chapter beyond verse 21 and you’ll see that it turns out not to be damning at all: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+3&version=ESV. Still, ‘critical’ or the like seemed rather too flimsy an adjective for such a strongly-worded passage.

⁶ Try Luke 18:9-14: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2018&version=ESV.   

⁷ Again, I do apologise for being unable to cite properly. Still, if you fancied reading the book for yourself and determining whether my paraphrase is a reasonably remembered one, copies are available on Amazon for literally a penny: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0860653641/?tag=ecosia07-21. 

⁸ In fact, Jesus says these are the two most important commandments: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESV.