BENGALURU: There’s a meme going around on the internet with the line, “You can only truly love someone as much as you love yourself.” It came across a couple of times, with slightly different backgrounds – once with someone looking at another person in the distance on the calm waters of a possibly Goan sunset, and another was a picture of someone standing at the fluttering colourful flags of a Buddhist stupa across a barren landscape, like one might find in Ladakh.
Both pictures chosen as evocative of that longing to love and be loved one supposes, though the message could easily be juxtaposed to one person looking at the camera in a crowd of masked commuters in a Mumbai suburban train, or amongst the crowds at Times Square, New York, or even an ordinary domestic scene of a person sipping their tumbler of coffee with their daily newspaper.
“You can only truly love someone as much as you love yourself.” If you haven’t seen the meme, you might still be able to visualise any image, think of the caption above and you might feel it really fits and that there’s something that rings very true about it.Is it, though?
Are we really limited in our ability to love or be loved in this way? Or any other way, for that matter? An equally powerful set of words that is bandied about on love is, “You can only love as much as you were loved yourself,” and that too rings true. Check it for yourself. Imagine those words against the images described above and see what you feel -- chances are you might find yourself resonating with it, thinking it is true and maybe even sighing a little, thinking that’s what it is – you don’t love yourself enough or you weren’t loved enough yourself, and so you can’t really love as deeply as others seem able to love.
These are akin to memes that come around that start with “Psychology says,” and go on to assert something that may have no real basis except maybe that somebody thought of those words strung together and it sounded right. There are hundreds of millions of such thoughts that go around, and we tend to go by what we resonate with, rather than check to see if that’s really true.
The honest to goodness truth is that there’s nothing definite about any of it, and certainly nothing that limits love to one’s love for oneself or how one has been loved. Even for people who may have experienced trauma or abuse as a child, it does not set a ceiling for how much love one is capable of giving or receiving, though it might take a fair bit of work to get through the impacts of such trauma. We really don’t need such memes floating around. They aren’t true and they are such a disservice to society, and it is saddest if someone reading them believes it and therefore limits themselves. You want a real act of love? If you get such memes, don’t share them. (The author is a counsellor with InnerSight)