How do you feel when your partner buys you gifts or flowers? It makes you feel special, doesn’t it? If they say they miss you? You feel loved, don’t you?

But what if they get caught up with other things and forget to call you? Or worse, if they take you for granted? You may feel like you did something to deserve it, that maybe you are not good looking enough or loving enough.

What if they don’t want to be with you? If they hurt or abuse you? You may blame yourself, thinking you caused it or that you disappointed your partner, and perhaps you’d try harder to please them and make them come back.

Do you look to your partner to make you feel good, to feel worthy? Does your assessment of yourself depend on what your partner says or thinks about you? Do you feel your partner “completes” you?

Often, people think of relationships as a coming together of two semi-circles to form a complete circle. In other words, two half-fulfilled individuals join together to complete one another. Romantic as it may seem, this doesn't work over a period of time. When you depend on your partner for validation, and even happiness and self-worth, chances are that the love in the relationship will quickly be replaced by neediness and suffocation. Over a period of time, someone else may not be able to consistently make you feel good about yourself, and when you don't feel good about yourself the relationship will not feel good anymore too. Moreover, if you don’t feel good about yourself, how will you make your partner feel good? Expectations and disappointment, resentment and fights… sound familiar?

True love can only thrive when two complete individuals come together – two whole circles that choose to be connected like the links of a chain.

So how does one break the cycle? How do we form equitable, loving and mutually satisfying relationships? Remember the two complete circles! In order to ever fully love anyone else, you need to first fully and unconditionally love yourself.

Only when you see yourself for who you really are, accept yourself with all your faults and shortcomings and love yourself in spite of them, will you be able to understand, accept and love your partner for who they are.

That is when you’ll be able to say: “It’s nice to get flowers, but it won’t shatter me if I don’t”.

Have a healthy, happy and respectful relationship, with yourself and those around. And if you are having trouble with either, talking to an objective counsellor can help you identify traps and help you overcome them.