Self-love: Echo of love received
I have spent years pondering the idea of self-love, only for it to elude me repeatedly, having never found the language that could hold it. The term feels familiar, yet foreign, born of a Western way of understanding the self and love so different from the one that shaped me. I was taught to carry myself with dignity, to take responsibility and to live in ways that honor our moral principles, allowing harmony to unfold within my relationships. But “self-love” was not a word spoken in my childhood home, nor in the circle of women who nurtured me. Perhaps that is why contemporary discussions of the idea often feel at odds with my own experience.
Part of the difficulty lies in the word “love” itself. In English, it carries so many meanings that it resists a singular explanation. Yet the moment we say “love,” the mind often leaps to sweeping romance or physical intimacy. Its elasticity makes “self-love” sound like either self-indulgence or a hazy notion that evaporates when we try to define it.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a helpful definition. In her book “Love 2.0,” she describes love not as a permanent emotional state or something out there to be found, but as “micro-moments of positive resonance” — brief pulses of shared connection that reverberate through eye contact, an attentive pause, gentle tones of voice, synchronized gestures or expressions of mutual care. These micro-moments can emerge even in brief encounters with strangers. Such moments register in the nervous system and accumulate over time, reshaping our biology, stoking emotional capacity and strengthening resilience. Fredrickson suggests that love is generated through interaction — through the experiences of being seen, heard and responded to. Even in our relationship with ourselves, this form of resonance matters: The kindness we extend to our inner voice mirrors the very processes that give life to our connections with others.
This relational understanding of love reflects my own upbringing in Korea, where a collectivist culture shapes how love is expressed and understood. I was raised by a constellation of women in my community whose advice, warmth and attentive presence filled the ordinary moments of our lives, where love revealed itself in shared meals, stories passed down, gestures of protection and quiet resistance to hardship. The boundaries among us were naturally fluid, not enmeshed but representing a cultural way of sustaining mutual care and resilience. My sense of self — and eventually self-love — emerged through their steadiness: the way they saw me, spoke to me and held me in that shared space.
Perhaps that is why the Western insistence on love as self-contained within firm interpersonal boundaries has never fully resonated with me. In much of the mental health literature I have read, love is framed as something that requires clear demarcations — knowing precisely where “I” end and “you” begin. Without such boundaries, you cannot love well. But my experience, shaped by Korean relational contexts, suggests that boundaries can be both present and permeable. They shift in response to relationships, because care and identity flow among the people who accompany us through life. For many, including myself, self-love often takes root because we are first loved by others. Care, safety, affirmation and tenderness flow inward long before we encounter the language of self-love. Loving others becomes one of the doorways through which self-love becomes possible.
For me, acceptance and patience have always been at the center of what love feels like, even as they remain the qualities I struggle with most. My caregivers taught me that people are, in many ways, unknowable — like an unfathomable ocean — and that this unknowability is a reminder of our capacity to grow and change in ways that reveal themselves with time. Rather than trying to force others into shapes that suit our desires — an effort as futile as trying to mold water — we are called to meet one another with acceptance. We wait patiently for what may unfold. Self-love mirrors the love I have received from others: a willingness to accept myself as I am, including undesired emotions, while trusting that growth continues even when not evident. It means resisting the impulse to sculpt myself into idealized versions of who I should be and instead extending to myself the same patience I offer others as I learn and grow.
Self-love matters. It can arise within us or in the company of others, nurtured by the small exchanges that remind us we belong to one another. For many of us, especially those shaped by communal traditions, self-love is the echo of love received. Seen this way, love is a broad landscape, one that shapes not only how we meet others, but how we eventually learn to meet ourselves.
Ma Kyung-hee is an editor and researcher in Seoul.