To centre a piece on ‘self-love’ feels slightly juvenile, a little irreverent, and undeniably tongue-in-cheek. Of course I am all of these things. I have never, and will never, claim to be otherwise. But that this is the case elucidates my point, which is that low self-esteem has become far too commonly accepted and appreciated by everyone around us, to the extent that ‘self-love’ becomes a joke.

In popular culture, Justin Bieber uses ‘You should go and love yourself’ as an insult, while One Direction tell you that your most beautiful feature is that ‘you don’t know you’re beautiful’. A logical rendering of these arguments is that to love yourself is degrading while to be insecure is to be desirable. Heaven forbid you retain any sense of self-worth unless Harry Styles has approved it first.

If only the kind of self-love I am grasping for here were as easily packaged as the sort you can buy at Ann Summers, requiring only AAA batteries to reach rampant rapture. Unfortunately self-love doesn’t sell quite so well as capitalising on insecurity, so instead we are at the mercy of adverts that ask us if we are beaming like the ‘beach body ready’ models staring back at us, or whether we are as happy as the couple that have just upgraded their broadband provider. It only sells products to some, but everyone buys the message that we are not as happy as the beautiful people in the adverts.
So we look for the things that differentiate us from them and, subsequently, we become torturously insecure. To talk about self-love feels wildly aspirational in a culture that strives toward self-acceptance, with many falling short of even that. To love yourself, or even to display a vague sense of satisfaction, is hard.

I feel that before I go any further in trying to talk with more sincerity about a subject I relate to intimately, I need to confront the fact that it may sound like I’m talking about masturbation. Not as unintentional as you may assume (all rise for a haphazard prose style and digressive routes through an argument), I believe there is some value in this confusion.

If our understanding of self-love is confined to it being a euphemism for masturbating there is something wrong. In doing so we narrow the ways in which one has the capacity to love their self. It cannot be the end of the relationship.

The fact is that we are all in relationships with ourselves. This relationship is almost impossible to view objectively, for obvious reasons. I will try to draw an example the only way I know how: an incriminating allegory of a sexual nature.

Have you ever had sex with someone who treated it like masturbation? I hope you haven’t, but I have and I do not recommend it. I vaguely remember hearing some aphorism about bad sex with people who are just using a partner ‘instead of their hand’. After having reached climax (it doesn’t matter if their partner has too) it’s over. They will probably fall asleep on you. It will be sweaty and sticky in all the wrong ways, and you will want to leave as quickly as possible.

You don’t want to be in the above scenario with yourself. I would never advise anyone to renounce their vibrator: reductive though I may be, I am no idiot. I sympathise hugely with the line from Annie Hall in which Alvy defends masturbating as the only time he can have sex with someone he loves. My narcissism is so pronounced that even when satiated I am left asking whether I love myself enough. Why does it stop at orgasm? Why aren’t I taking me for breakfast, or texting me to ask how my day is going, or wondering if I am thinking about me?

What I am trying to put across is the complexity of the relationship we have with ourselves. To learn to love something so frustrating and unpredictable as oneself is difficult, and wherever we look there seems to be no message saying you are worthy of love just as you are.

Self-confidence has become rare. So rare, in fact, that we resort to armouring ourselves in suits of cynicism. It makes sense. Without being too blunt about the whole thing, people can be shit. People can act carelessly, be entirely narcissistic, or simply be hurtful. After hours spent agonising about what you may have done to warrant this, cynicism becomes a way of saving face, and thus we choose to feign a sense of detachment.

Of course, I am guilty of this. And in lieu of living in a barrel on the Sidgwick Site declaring myself to be Diogenes gone mad, what else does the modern cynic do other than distrust? I consider myself a wizened cynic, but this is translated from philosophy to defence mechanism too quickly. It may seem wise to resist the temptation of lifting the smokescreen of self-deprecating humour and attempted aloofness, but in navigating the relationship between how we present ourselves and our self-worth, I may be just about ready to rescind my cynicism.