https://theoutline.com/post/5970/unconventional-wisdom-emotional-readiness-is-bullshit?zd=1&zi=inxhj5xg

Looking at this construction at a remove, it’s easy to see the trap. Setting out to love yourself because that’s the only way to gain love from others is a knot that undoes itself when pulled; needlessness as the tactic to get something one needs is impossible. But it’s an attractive emotional tautology in part because it keeps those who subscribe to it trapped in its hamster wheel, forever able to blame ourselves for wanting, when the fact of wanting is both the reason for never finding a relationship and the proof that we are not ready for it. The advice that you cannot love or be loved until you can love yourself perfectly fits with our time and our contemporary culture’s sickness. We are everywhere told we have agency by the very corporate or political actors who deny it to us. We want to control what can’t be controlled, we want to believe we can win or lose at things that fundamentally resist achievement. When we do not find love, we are able to blame ourselves for simultaneously not wanting it enough and not having sufficiently purged ourselves of wanting. To think of self-love as a goal-oriented progression leading to a tangible result, comparable to accumulating money in a savings account in order to purchase a house, is perhaps more harmful, in its cheery self-deception, than simply accepting that these things occur primarily through random chance. Equally useless is the idea that the love of others is some earned reward doled out at the zenith of one’s journey to self-love. Saying one is deserving of love is always only a few shades of nuance over from the idea that one is entitled to it. Nobody deserves love, or doesn’t deserve it; the only way people end up in relationships with one another is through random chance, and none of us are ready for it when we do. I’m currently in a great relationship, and how I got into that relationship can be summed up in one sentence: I got lucky. I was kind of a mess when I got into it; I’m kind of a mess now. My parents, who have been married for 35 years, met when they were both going through divorces. My dad’s relationship advice has always been that the best time to meet someone is, counter to conventional wisdom, when you’re in the worst possible emotional place. At least, goes his thinking, then you find out early if you’re willing or able to do the hard work of a relationship with this person. I don’t know that this advice is necessarily perfect, but it at least has more logic to it than the idea of some perfect emotional readiness. Most of us are kind of a mess, and even those who aren’t can’t guarantee love will find them because they have more wholly accepted themselves. Extremely self-loathing people find love all the time; extremely emotionally stable people often live without a romantic relationship. Love itself is not necessarily good or healthy. Romantic relationships provide benefits and also stressors and both of those things are usually not the benefits or the stressors that accepted wisdom tells us they will provide. Love neither fixes us nor arrives as a reward for our fixing ourselves.