Are we missing the boat on Love? Part 3

It's a curious thing that in conversations about unconditional love, many women say things like, "I don't want to be anyone's doormat!"

Who said anything about being a doormat? Many women seem to define unconditional as meaning boundless. Some think that unconditional loving means you must put up with other people's bullshit. This is wrong, error thinking through and through. And here's why.

Unconditional love does not involve being a doormat or putting up with other people's toxic bullshit because unconditional love starts with unconditional self-love. We're not being self-loving if we allow ourselves to be a doormat or tolerate other people's toxic bullshit.

Genuine self-love means we honor our truth, maintain healthy personal boundaries and embrace our personal power. In a nutshell, it means honoring our sovereignty. From a place of sovereignty, we extend genuine love to ourselves first and stop treating ourselves in unloving ways.

Through our genuine self-love and sovereignty we stop allowing others to treat us in unloving ways too. When we master that, we are in a better position to both receive and give genuine love in an open, empowered way instead of a fearful, controlling one.

Not many, if any, of us grow up learning how to genuinely love ourselves. It's curious that women can be 100% clear about what they don't want in love yet oftentimes have no idea what they do want. We know that fairy tale love is not real but let's admit that for many women, there is a part of us that still hopes for it.

When it comes to love, women struggle to genuinely accept and love ourselves. That's not surprising since the culture of white male supremacy goes back for centuries, burying women and others beneath a false shroud of "less than." In the history of the USA, for instance, women's genius contributions to society are continuously and intentionally ignored or hidden behind men who falsely yet happily take credit where it's not due.

For more on what makes it hard for women to love themselves, check out PART 4 of this series.