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.’

I am going to lay my cards on the table, and say I am sceptical of this position; particularly the way it can ironically make you feel worse about yourself in moments of human frailty.* I mean, how many people actually believe, 100% of the time, that they have ‘infinite worth’? Is that even a good thing? A shade of self-doubt is what keeps you open-minded and receptive, pretty much the essential skill for being in a relationship. And, like it or not, humans are social creatures. The majority of us find validation through connection. Of course this doesn’t have to be within a romantic relationship. But if that’s what you’re craving - and you say twice in your letter that it is - then I would encourage you to look for it; just as I’d have encouraged you to seek out friendships or community, if that had been the wish at the heart of your message.

I started off thinking that your problem was uniquely modern; inflicted by the perfection-oriented mantras of our time. But, on reflection, I wonder if classic literature has also done you a bit of a dirty. Because in the arc of a traditional bildungsroman - a ‘coming-of-age’ novel - marriage is the reward for a protagonist who completes their journey of self-discovery (at least, it is when they’re a woman). It is only after Elizabeth has overcome her tendency toward quick assumption and realised ‘til this moment, I never knew myself’ that she is ready to marry Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s Emma learns similar lessons in humility of judgement. Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdene and Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood all learn to balance passionate, idealistic impulses with a mature understanding of the realities of love.

With this as your cultural legacy, you’d be forgiven for thinking you need to be the finished project before you deserve a happy ending. But for the first time, I am going to argue against learning from the classics, and say that there are plenty of reasons to believe this structural arc does not reflect the reality of existence. Firstly, novels are shaped by the needs of storytelling - characters have to change to make a narrative interesting. Secondly, these novels are shaped by the restrictions of their time: in the 19th century, it was hard to get a book about a woman published that didn’t end with her getting married. What’s more, the heroine’s marriage had to be presented as an ideal state, after which there was no more ‘work’ to be done.

Counterintuitively, I think these novels are actually what put me off the idea of marriage as a teenager: it was where the story stopped; where the adventure ended. But my adult life has taught me there is plenty of room for growth, adventure and self-development inside a relationship, too. Connection - preferably positive, but even the average or negative kind - contains enormous potential for teaching us about ourselves.

Which brings me to the aspect of these books that does strike me as true. In all of them, it is only by experiencing first hand the pit-falls and pleasures of romance that our heroines finally end up in the relationship that is right for them. We learn by doing, often enough. And this is why I am hesitant to recommend excising dating from your life if more love is what you’re after.

You tell me you are worried that getting your heart broken will knock your confidence further. Perhaps. But perhaps having ‘loved and lost’ will remind you that love is possible. You also say dating is anxiety inducing. I could be wrong, but I just can’t imagine dating being less anxiety-inducing after a year of not doing it. I suppose the language in your letter - words like ‘anxiety’ and ‘scared’ - makes me wonder whether your quest for worthiness is a way of avoiding going after the thing you really want.

I have come down pretty hard against The Year of Fixing, so now I would like to offer some caveats. Firstly, being single can be just as romantic, fulfilling and exciting as having a partner, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted it - I just don’t think you do. Secondly, of course I wish you loved yourself more (you sound so nice!), and I’m sure it would make dating easier. But I think it is a project that could exist in tandem with romance. So keep throwing yourself into the things that make you feel worthy: those good friends and the good career sound like the place to start. And finally, while I don’t think you need to stop dating altogether, I do think you should try to change your approach; firstly by accepting the next ten people you meet will definitely be duds and that this is all part of your delicious quest as a 19th century heroine. Get your friends to help with this: tell them you are finding dating hard, and ask someone to debrief with you on the phone after every date you go on (who wouldn’t want this job? Give me your number and I’ll do it if you want). Pick someone who affirms you, and helps you see the light-hearted side of dating - this will help to keep things in perspective.

And, while I don’t think you need to reach a point of total self-sufficiency to be ready to date, I do think you have to know there are things in the world you would not trade for the prize of a relationship; situations that would be worse than being alone, in order to protect yourself. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre models this attitude. Jane, a humble governess, is in love with Rochester, the enigmatic master of Thornfield Hall. But when Rochester asks her to marry him, Jane refuses, because he already has a wife locked up in his attic (and I say fair enough, Jane). Jane knows this morally compromising situation would be even worse than losing him, and tells Rochester as much in some of the most inspiring lines of fiction ever written:

‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’

You might think at first that this is the speech of someone with ‘infinite worth’. But I don’t think so; I think that verb ‘can’ is an important and tender qualifier. Jane doesn’t say it will be easy. She doesn’t say she’ll be just as happy on her own. It’s just she can do it, if she has to. She’s strong enough for that.

There are people in the world who are not ready to be in a relationship: people whose demons leave them capable of causing others serious harm. Your introspective, empathetic letter suggests to me you are not one of them. So keep shoring up your inward treasure, and at the same time, know that it is your right even as an imperfect human to seek connection. The most radical thing you could do for your self-worth is accept you already deserve love - just as you are.

*One of my aims for this Substack was to always use the word ironically correctly and this was a perfect use.