Start by loving yourself. Every part of finding love, and of being in love with someone else, is made easier by loving yourself. You need to believe that you’re worthy of love, and that you have something to offer someone else, that your love would benefit the person you love. You don’t need to be perfect, you can be deeply flawed, but you need to love yourself.
Next find someone who’s worthy of love. Find a good person. Attraction is important, but beautiful people are a dime a dozen. Find a good person, someone who you can feel good supporting. Believing that your partner is good will make every sacrifice that love entails easier. Disagreements, conflicts, the finite nature of life and energy, all are easier to navigate when you know that your partner is good and maybe they are worth prioritizing, or maybe it’s you who’s in the wrong.
Believe that your love will be good for them. Don’t think in terms of what you want from them; keep at the forefront of your mind what you can do for them. This is a good person, and you love them, so put their needs first. Believe that you have something to offer, and offer it. And, if given the chance, follow-through on that offer: make their life better.
Loving yourself, and believing that you would be good for them, will make the initial approach easier: you have something to give, and you are asking for the opportunity to give it. Believing that they are good, respecting them as a person, softens concerns about rejection: if they don’t want what you’re offering, maybe you don’t know what they need as well as you thought, and they need something else. Because you love yourself, you can accept that.
Because you want what’s best for them, and trust their choices, and love yourself, you can support them if they want something other than you, you can sincerely hope they find it, because they deserve it. This is true from the initial approach, and it remains true throughout your relationship: you want to be with them so long as you are good for them, and if you stop being good for them, you can accept that.
Being able to accept that also makes it less likely to occur. A true desire to enrich their life to the point of sacrificing your own desire will help you deliver. But merely accepting that if you fail to deliver they would be right to leave makes the possibility of their leaving less threatening. It diminishes the fear, the jealousy, the possessiveness, the need to control. It makes it easier to have a love that feels natural, that feels secure, that feels good.
Forgive their imperfections. Love them not in spite of their imperfections, but because of their imperfections. Love their imperfections because they are theirs. Find their most infuriating qualities endearing. But recognize their imperfections: no one is perfect, but you will trick yourself into seeing perfection, and if you do that you’ll be devastated when you notice the imperfections. So notice the imperfections early. Love the imperfections, but know that they are imperfections. Forgive their mistakes, don’t hold on to them or wield them like a cudgel. If you’re mad, you can just say “I love you, but I’m mad.”
Forgive your own imperfections. Make mistakes, forgive yourself, and ask forgiveness. You’ve failed yourself and them. Make amends. You aren’t perfect, you have real imperfections. But love your imperfections because they’re yours. None of this works if you don’t love yourself.
