I LOVE MYSELF, WHAT NEXT?

By: Ayomide Adebayo

There’s a positive reinforcement on the importance of self-love, and being satisfied with yourself and your own company. In media, we’ve seen a rise in main female leads ditching the “love-finally-gotten” trope, and choosing their own peace and company. Songs highlighting the appeal of self-love, and encouraging women to focus on the other joys life has to offer: travel, friendships, food. The message is clear and reassuring: you are enough, on your own.

And I believe it. I really do.

But self-love, once fully achieved, turns out to be less of a climax and more of a baseline. You realize that it wasn’t the end goal to be achieved, but the basis for every choice you make as a person.  It doesn’t answer every question, neither doesn’t erase loneliness or the ache to love and be loved. Loving yourself wouldn’t suddenly make life feel complete, it simply makes it easier. There is a peace gotten after the affirmation is realized, and a space where there is no need to chase validation, but there is also no longer any distraction caused by the chase. When you stop defining happiness and love by being chosen, you have to define it yourself, and that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Travel is wonderful, but it ends. Friends are essential, but they go home to lives that aren’t yours. Food comforts, but it doesn’t fill everything. Self-love teaches you how to sit with yourself, but it doesn’t always tell you what to do once you’re alone. There’s a strange pressure to be endlessly fulfilled by this independence, as if wanting more means you’ve failed at loving yourself properly.

Sometimes I worry that the narrative has swung too far. Romantic love once felt compulsory, now indifference toward it is treated as enlightenment and freedom from societal pressures. But self-love isn’t about closing doors. It’s about standing in front of them without desperation. Wanting connection doesn’t negate self-sufficiency; it coexists with it.

So what’s next after self-love?

Perhaps it’s allowing romantic love back into the conversation, not to fill a void or as a missing piece, but as something expansive. Something that can exist in all its fullness without demanding the erasure of everything else that has been built.

Loving yourself should never kill your capacity for romantic love. If anything, it should make the idea of love richer. There’s no longer a need for a love that replaces our lives, but a want for one that walks alongside it, curious rather than consuming.

You can still board a plane alone or with friends.  You can still have nights that belong entirely to me. Friendship doesn’t become less sacred just because romantic love enters the room; if anything, it becomes more intentional. Love shouldn’t flatten the landscape of a life but add dimensions to it.

Romantic love, at its best, isn’t about being chosen over everything else. It’s about being chosen within everything else. So no, self-love isn’t the end of the story (unless you want it to be). And love, in turn, doesn’t have to be diminished to fit a narrative of independence.