Am I Ready For a Relationship?

With advice from Jane Eyre & the classic novel at large

My question is this: is it okay for me to date while I’m struggling to look at myself as worthy of love? Or should I spare them (potential dates) from the possible future incidents where I might feel insecure? I really want to find someone who will be there for me through my ups and downs, but I also know you need to work on yourself in order to be ready for a relationship. It’s not that my life is a mess, I have good friends and a good career (I’m a 30 yr old woman), but my self esteem is not great so I find dating anxiety inducing, and I’m scared I’ll get my heart broken which will knock my confidence further. Also, will I be a bad partner in my current state? I really want to meet someone. But maybe I could navigate it all better if I took a year out to fix myself first?

I want to start by saying that everything about your message suggests to me you will be a good partner. For one thing, you are already concerned about your potential love interest’s wellbeing - you also have, as you say, a great career and social life - and most of all, you actually want to meet someone. Not everybody does.

But I understand why you’re in two minds about dating. In our era of self-optimisation, healing journeys, and Lizzo declaring ‘I’m my own soulmate’, the idea that you can’t love someone until you love yourself has become a kind of truism. To irrefutably prove my point, I just googled ‘do I need to fix myself before a relationship?’ and the first result told me that ‘we must have learned through… self-improvement that we have infinite worth before it can be validated by anyone else.’