Dating is ostensibly the business of searching for someone to love.
But in order for it to go well, it requires us to first work on a much more fundamental relationship, that we have with ourselves.
We won't be successful daters, or indeed, successful lovers, if we haven't first reached a healthy perspective on our own natures.
Dating presents us with the ultimate test of our powers of discernment and of our sense of self-worth.
So what exactly does it mean to suggest that we may need to learn to love ourselves before we go on to try to love someone else?
Merely that we won't be in any position to work out who is kind and good, who's worth investing in, until we are firmly on our own side.
We need to have overcome our self-suspicion to be sure of what we deserve, to have a healthy sense of our value in order to correctly judge who could adequately reward our presence, and in order not to despair at all the rejection we will inevitably encounter on our journey to love.
Here then are some of the many rules born out of adequate self-love that stand a chance of keeping us safe and more or less calm during the turbulence of the dating process.
If they take an age to answer a message, we must walk away.
If we feel obligated, but deep down don't feel comfortable, we must walk away.
