Pouring From an Empty Cup Part 2: How a Lack of Self-Love Can Negatively Manifest in Relationships

It’s been a week since I posted Part 1 of this blog, so in case you missed it - here’s a LIL’ RECAP:

A lack of self-love can trigger feelings of extreme emptiness, which cause you to go searching for wholeness and a sense of self worth from sources outside yourself - namely your romantic relationships. In this state you’ll be so desperate for fulfillment and feelings of good enough-ness (<— saying that with love) that you won’t be able to view situations or people objectively, and will likely find you resonate with one or all of the following regarding your love life: 1. You attract shitty partners and you don’t know why. 2. You have standards but find yourself putting up with/making excuses for shitty behavior. And 3. You are presently, or are rapidly becoming, a straight up emotional basket case because your happiness is rooted externally and there are too many highs and lows/ups and downs for you to keep up.

Below are the remaining three of the six signposts indicating a lack of self-love may be driving the ship that is the way you operate within, and show up for, romantic relationship(s):

You constantly pick fights out of anger over feeling unsupported, undesirable, or unloved.

Relying on external sources to feel happy and whole will throw your ability to realistically perceive your relationship and/or courtship completely out of whack. In this state you aren’t able to see clearly because the pain of not loving or accepting yourself is too intense, so you seek out relationships in an effort to get those emotional needs met from another. While this works temporarily, you inevitably realize the pain is still there and thus continue to seek out more and more validation or proof of desire from your partner. No one is capable of sustaining these feelings within you long-term, however, meaning the time will come where they eventually can’t deliver - and then you’ll pick fights with them because of it. You’ll air unfair grievances born out of unfair expectations, and attribute your feelings of being unlovable, undesirable or unsupported entirely to their behavior. You’ll think your partner must not be doing enough, because if they were you wouldn’t feel this way. But the reality is that so many of our relational issues are ultimately about our own healing. With that in mind, try to take a broader, more objective view of your relationship and look at the things that make you angry.

Ask yourself: Is your partner actually doing anything concrete that’s worth fighting over? If so, have that fight you’re dying to pick. If you’re not sure what they’ve actually done that’s ‘wrong’, however, and notice yourself feeling extremely reactive to seemingly minor infractions, your inherent feelings of emptiness and subsequent projection of those feelings are probably what’s actually at play.

You feel imprisoned by contradictions between what you deserve, what you’re getting, and what feels good.

When you’re in a relationship because of the sense of fulfillment it provides rather than the genuine desire you feel for your partner, it can create all kinds of contradictory information between your head and your heart. On one hand, the relationship feels so good. You feel lovable and validated and accepted and worthy and valued and it’s warm and it’s cozy and it’s comfortable and it’s nice. But on the other hand, maybe your partner doesn’t provide the level of intellectual stimulation you want. Maybe they’re not as emotionally supportive or attentive as you’d like. Maybe they aren’t super warm toward you or as affectionate as you want them to be. Whatever the case, if your partner doesn’t line up with the nonnegotiable qualities you know you want in a relationship, you’ll know it on a gut level. And while someone with a preestablished sense of self-love will have little problem interpreting this gut feeling as a sign of a mismatch that needs to be called off, someone depending entirely on that mismatch for fulfillment will feel ambivalent and confused. They’ll see things as shades of grey rather than black and white, and constantly grapple with what to do because they don’t want to face the truth.

Ask yourself: Do you have a pattern of constantly vacillating over what your needs within a relationship truly are? Do you have intense periods of overthinking, and the ever-present feeling of being stuck in a state of paralysis because you can’t figure out what you really want? Or whether or not your partner falls short of it? If so, it’s probably time to get brutally honest with yourself and face some hard truths you’ve been trying to avoid.

You become a crappy partner yourself.

Have you ever heard the saying you can’t pour from an empty cup? It essentially means that in order to show up fully and as your healthiest, most balanced self to relationships, you need to take care of yourself first. You need to be kind to yourself. You need to love yourself. You need to fill your own voids, take care of yourself emotionally, and learn how to cultivate your own sense of self-love, self-worth, self-esteem, and self-respect. Not only for the various reasons discussed above and in Part 1, but because you’ll be a shell of a partner without doing so - primed and ready to take a hell of a lot more than you give. If you’re lacking self-love and currently operating within relationships from that place of incompleteness, this is probably already happening. It’s hardly ever a conscious thing though, and you probably don’t even realize how empty you feel on your own or how out of balance your give-and-take ratio really is. It takes a ton of self-awareness to lift the veil and see things objectively for how they really are. But whether you’re aware of it or not, understand that showing up fully for your partner as their equal is contingent on showing up fully for yourself first.

Ask yourself: how balanced is your dynamic with your partner as it currently stands? Do you give to them just as much as they give to you? Is there an imbalance? Do you find yourself being overly needy and demanding?

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Finding that any of the six signposts resonate from Part 1 or Part 2 is in no way confirmation that you’re definitely leading with your trauma in relationships - but you should get curious. Get curious about the way you’re showing up in your courtships or partnerships and assess the bigger picture of how you behave within them. To reiterate - I am not a therapist. I’m just a person who has been through some sh*t in dating with a lack of self-love department that wants to share what she’s learned from her experiences. But a therapist would be a great place to start as far as unpacking these issues and getting to the root of what’s really going on. For the record, this is also not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t want or expect your partner to say and do nice things that make you feel good. I mean, duh. We all want to be showered with compliments and told how great we are, right? But if your partner is your only source for feelings of worthiness, wholeness, or good enough-ness? That’s where you get yourself into trouble. Happiness will forever be an inside job, and no one has the time, energy, patience, or ability to forever serve as the substructure for yours.

I think I’ll wrap this up now, but listen. I obviously don’t know you personally but I’d bet you’re a total catch, right? That’s great. But until you satiate your own hunger for love, acceptance, validation, and worthiness with the tender love and care you keep trying to get from another, you’ll be an emotional vampire too busy putting out all the wrong vibes and twerking your way down half the DSM-5 for anyone to see how much you truly have to offer. If you think you’re pouring from an empty cup and seeking relationships from a place of emptiness to feel whole, do yourself a favor and find that therapist, work through those issues around self-love, and take back control of your own happiness. Become so in love with who you are that the presence of external validation makes no difference in how you feel because you no longer depend on it to feel okay.

Work on yourself, love yourself, and take care of yourself - and everything else will fall magically into place thereafter. Your search of wholeness from other people will end at last, and you’ll finally be able to show up fully for partners as the supportive equal they need.

You’re amazing – and here’s to you knowing it without needing anyone else to tell you.

All my love.