may respond the day they start to love us back. Some of the reasons we fall in love

with people is because we long to escape from ourselves into the embrace of a person who

appears as beautiful, perfect and accomplished as we feel ourselves to be flawed, dumb and

mediocre. But what if such a being were one day turn around and love us back? Nothing

could discredit them faster. How could they be as divine as we had hoped when they have

the bad taste to approve of someone like us? It turns out that one of the central requirements

of a good relationship is a degree of affection for ourselves; built up over the years, largely

in childhood. We need a legacy of being deserving of love in order not to respond very obtusely

to the affections granted to us by adult partners. Without a decent amount of self-love, the

love of another person will always prove sickening and misguided – and we will self-destructively

– though unconsciously – set out to repel or disappoint it. It will simply feel more

normal and therefore comfortable to be disliked or ignored when that is mostly what we have

known. If we are not wholly convinced of our own lovability, receiving affection can appear

like being bestowed a prize for an accomplishment we don’t feel we ever earned. People unfortunate

enough to fall in love with self-hating types must brace themselves for the recriminations

due to all false flatterers. There is the old joke made by Groucho Marx about not deigning

to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member. We laugh at the Marxist

position because of its absurd contradictions: how is it possible that we should both wish

to join a club, and yet lose that wish as soon as it comes true? Why wouldn’t we just

be happy to have been allowed into a club? The answer lies in self-hatred; because for

many of us, being accepted into a grand and beautiful club doesn’t feel like what our

inner psyches have been shaped to accept. We wonder how we can continue to believe in

the club, or indeed the beloved now that they believe in us. There is usually a troubling

Marxist moment in every relationship, a moment when it becomes clear that love is going to

be reciprocated; that we won’t simply admire someone from afar without hope of mutuality.

The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred

gains the upper hand, then the one who is being loved back will declare that the beloved

(on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating

with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, then both partners may accept

that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how

lovable they have themselves turned out to be. It turns out that knowing how to love

ourselves a little can be one of the kindest and therefore most romantic things we can

ever learn to do for our partners.