My Significant Other Was My Inner Self

How did you meet your significant other?

By: SodakArtist

To answer this question honestly, I don’t have a significant other. I’ve tried, and I don’t regret losing my marriage because without it, I’m not sure I’d ever be as strong, artistic, or knowledgeable as I am today. I’ve been single for six going on seven years now, and while that wasn’t necessarily the path I would have chosen for myself, it became a path that taught me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way: how to be alone without being empty, and how to love myself without needing someone else to prove that I was worth loving.

That realization didn’t happen overnight. It came through years of experiences, mistakes, loss, loneliness, self-discovery, and some of the darkest periods of my life. There are parts of that story I don’t need to explain in detail because what happened to me isn’t nearly as important to this story as what I learned from it.

I didn’t always understand myself. I didn’t always like myself. I certainly didn’t always know how to take care of myself. But I kept learning. I kept creating. I kept questioning. I kept moving forward. And somewhere along that journey, I discovered that being alone wasn’t the punishment I once thought it was. It became the space where I finally had the opportunity to meet the person beneath everything I had been taught to believe about myself.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking why someone else couldn’t love me the way I needed and started asking myself a much harder question: How can you truly love another person if you’ve never learned how to exist peacefully with yourself?

I think we throw the words “self-love” around pretty casually these days. We associate it with taking yourself out to dinner, buying something you’ve wanted, taking a mental health day, or reminding yourself that you’re beautiful or worthy. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, but I think real self-love goes much deeper. It isn’t just about making yourself feel good. Sometimes it’s about having enough respect for yourself to face the parts of you that hurt, the parts you’re ashamed of, the parts you don’t understand, and the parts you’ve spent years trying to hide. It’s about becoming willing to sit with yourself long enough to discover who you actually are beneath the expectations, opinions, relationships, and experiences that have shaped you.

Spiritually, learning to love myself meant understanding that my existence has value independent of another person’s approval, possession, or affection. I don’t become more valuable because someone chooses me, and I don’t become less valuable because someone leaves me. My worth isn’t something another person gets to hand me or take away.

To begin understanding that, I had to spend some time looking inward instead of constantly looking outward for answers. I had to question what I believed about myself and where those beliefs came from. Some were mine, but some had been built from other people’s opinions, expectations, and the experiences I had lived through. The deeper I looked, the more I realized that my inner self wasn’t something another person needed to create for me. It was something I needed to discover.

Mentally, I had to start questioning the beliefs I had developed about myself. When you’ve spent enough time feeling unwanted, rejected, or alone, it’s easy to confuse being alone with being abandoned. They aren’t the same thing. Being abandoned tells you that someone left. Being alone simply tells you that nobody else is currently there.

To change that way of thinking, I had to stop treating every thought I had as a fact. I started asking myself questions: Is this actually true? Or have I believed it for so long that it simply feels true? That small shift changed a lot for me. I began separating who I actually was from who I had convinced myself I was supposed to be.

Being alone eventually became less frightening when I realized it gave me something I hadn’t had enough of before: space to hear my own thoughts and figure out which ones actually belonged to me.

Emotionally, I had to learn how to feel instead of simply react. I had to learn that anger doesn’t have to control me, sadness doesn’t make me weak, fear doesn’t automatically mean I should run, and loneliness doesn’t mean something is wrong with me.

The first step was simply learning to stop and ask, “Why am I feeling this?”

Sometimes anger was really hurt. Sometimes frustration was disappointment. Sometimes loneliness was the desire to feel understood. Once I started looking beneath the emotion instead of immediately reacting to it, I began learning what my emotions were actually trying to tell me.

Emotions are information. They can show us where we’ve been hurt, what we value, what we fear losing, and what we still need to understand. I didn’t have to eliminate those feelings. I had to learn how to listen to them without handing them control of my decisions.

Physically, loving myself meant recognizing that my body deserves the same respect as my mind and spirit. My body isn’t something to punish, neglect, or sacrifice for somebody else’s happiness. It is the physical vessel carrying me through this life. Taking care of it isn’t selfish or vain. It’s acknowledging that I am worth taking care of, even when nobody else is doing it for me.

My inner self may be invisible, but it still has to live through this physical body, and learning to respect one meant learning to respect the other.

Then there is the relational part, which may have been the hardest lesson of all. I learned that loving someone else shouldn’t require abandoning yourself. There is a difference between compromise and self-erasure. There is a difference between supporting someone and losing your own identity trying to keep them happy.

To understand that, I had to look honestly at my own relationships and ask myself where I had stopped being myself just to keep someone else happy. That isn’t about blaming another person. It’s about recognizing where I had failed to protect my own identity.

I learned that boundaries don’t mean you don’t love someone. Having your own dreams, beliefs, interests, and identity doesn’t make you less committed to another person. It gives you something real to bring into the relationship.

I think that’s one of the biggest things we forget about relationships. We spend so much time searching for someone who will complete us that we sometimes never stop to ask whether we’ve actually taken the time to know ourselves. We look for someone who will make us feel worthy, safe, loved, and understood, when some of that work has to happen within ourselves first.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need people. We do. Human beings need connection, companionship, affection, friendship, family, and love. Learning to love yourself isn’t about becoming so independent that you no longer need anyone. It’s about knowing yourself well enough that you can love someone without making them responsible for your entire sense of worth.

That’s what I think a healthy relationship should be: two people who know themselves, choose each other, and continue growing without either person having to disappear inside the other.

If I eventually meet someone who becomes my significant other, I don’t want her to be the person who completes me. I want her to be someone who already has her own life, her own mind, her own dreams, and her own sense of self—and I want to be able to stand beside her without either of us having to abandon who we are to keep the relationship alive.

I don’t know when that person will come into my life, or if it will happen at all. I’m no longer trying to force an answer to that question. I’ve learned that some things can’t be rushed simply because we’re uncomfortable with the uncertainty surrounding them.

For now, I’m grateful for the relationship I was forced to build with the one person who was with me through every single one of those years: myself. Not just the person I see in the mirror, but the inner self underneath the surface—the part of me that survived the things I thought would break me, questioned the things I thought I had to accept, and continued searching for meaning when it would have been easier to stop looking.

So, how did I meet my significant other?

I haven’t met that person yet.

But I did finally meet myself.

And maybe that’s the strange thing about spending years alone: sometimes you don’t lose yourself in solitude. Sometimes you finally find the part of yourself that was waiting to be heard.

Before I ever ask someone else to share my life, I think that’s probably the most important relationship I could have learned to build.

My significant other was my inner self.