Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about love.

Last month was February and it’s pretty tough NOT to associate the whole month with Valentine’s Day and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. I read Radical Self-Love by Gala Darling (HIGHLY recommended, by the way) and when Valentine’s Day rolled around, I celebrated it for the first time with my boyfriend who I’m totally crazy about. All of these things had my gears turning about love and self-love and how they work together.

I’ve never believed that whole “you have to love yourself before someone else can love you” thing, or its cousin, “you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” I mean first of all, how many people out there can actually, really say they love themselves? Self-love is a journey, and sometimes I feel like there is no actual destination – only progress. It’s hard to love yourself. We all have bad days and times when we feel like crap, times when we can’t even really say we LIKE ourselves. If self-love means arriving at a point when we can wake up every single day and look in the mirror and love what we see, I, for one, don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

But I can say that my relationships have never meant as much or been as amazing as this one is, and a big part of it is that this time I’ve started to try to get to that place of self-love.

I’ve talked a little bit about how I’ve been in a long-term relationship before. That first relationship overlapped with the darkest and very worst years of my life, years I don’t really even remember very clearly because they were shrouded in depression. I do remember the ferocity with which I did NOT love myself at the time. I hated my body, and when that wasn’t enough I started to hate other things about myself, too.

All of that’s a story in and of itself, but the short version is that because there was nothing I liked about myself, I didn’t believe there was anything my boyfriend could like about me, either. I would try my best to hide all of the ugliness away for fear he would leave me for someone better, someone naturally as perfect as I wanted to be. I would always wear makeup around him, even when I was sleeping, because I didn’t want him to see the flaws in my face. He didn’t like the things I was interested in so I stopped talking about them and I picked up his interests instead, thinking that the things I liked were embarrassing. Inevitably I would sometimes snap and all of the ugliness would come pouring out, and he was completely unprepared to deal with it. And who could blame him? While maybe I resented him a little for not being able to handle my whole self, how could I hold it against him when I had never given him my whole self to begin with?

After we broke up I went on a lot of dates with a lot of different guys. But I would do the same thing every time – always wear makeup so they never saw my flaws, hid away the majority of my personality except for the parts I thought they’d find attractive – because I didn’t think the real me was worth loving or getting to know. In doing that, I had doomed all of these relationships to fail from the very start. By not working towards loving myself, I was sabotaging these relationships before they even began.

I was frustrated with how inauthentic all of these relationships felt, but I realized it was because I wasn’t being authentic – and it wasn’t just romantic relationships, either. I would do the same thing with friends and coworkers, never being my full self because I was embarrassed about who I really was. I felt like I lacked any genuine connection with the people around me and because of it, I wasn’t getting the most out of my life. I decided to try focusing on really being me for a while and see what happened.

So I stopped hiding the things I enjoyed because I thought I should be embarrassed about them. In fact, I stopped being embarrassed all together. If I did something awkward or weird or totally ruined a moment, I thought hey, this is me. Take it or leave it. I started to fully, unashamedly embrace my weirdness. Every time I met someone new, being myself felt like issuing a challenge – can we get along if you see the real me? The answer wasn’t always yes, but I realized it was better to know up front that you can’t jive with a person than to, say, date them for five years before having it all come apart.

When my now-boyfriend and I met it was basically love at first sight – something I never believed in until it happened to me. I knew we’d be an amazing couple. But because of that, I approached this relationship completely the opposite way I’d approached all my others. I never tried to pretend I was perfect. He’s seen me without makeup and when I’m ugly crying while watching Furious 7 and when I’m having a rough day. And I have never felt so comfortable in a relationship in my life.

It’s so much more liberating to embrace your imperfections in a relationship, because do you know what? You’ll never be able to hide them forever anyway. Something will happen and your partner will see the giant zit you’ve been trying to cover, or you’ll show your stubborn side, or – god forbid – you’ll accidentally fart in front of them. These things happen to all of us because we’re all human. No one thinks, going into a relationship, that they’re dating a Barbie doll. We expect everyone to have human moments, flaws, and imperfections. The important thing is to find someone whose imperfections you can live with, so why not be up front about yours? If your partner is going to leave you because you don’t have perfect skin, wouldn’t you rather know from the start that they’re a shallow asshole rather than wearing makeup forever just to please them? It saves you so much trouble if you’re wholly yourself in a relationship – take it from a gal who hid herself away for most of her life.

That’s not to say that you should be mean and impolite and show up in dirty sweatpants to the first date. I mean, you get it. But don’t put up walls around parts of yourself thinking you’re sparing the other person from what you perceive as your flaws. I guarantee you, they’ll see them anyway – and you’ll never be able to feel truly comfortable around them if you’re always worried about whether you look good from that angle or what your bangs are doing. It’s better to find someone who loves who you are than to try to change for someone who doesn’t. And let me tell you as someone who has experienced each of these things, it is so, SO much better to be single than with someone who doesn’t love who you really are. The loneliness you feel being single is nothing compared to the loneliness you’ll feel when you’re with someone who doesn’t understand the real you.

I’ve no guarantee this relationship will last forever, because you can never guarantee that kind of thing. But if it fails at least I’ll be able to say hey, who I am didn’t work with who he is. I gave it my best shot and my whole me. Otherwise you’ll always be left wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t tried to be someone you’re not.

In the end, though, loving yourself is a lot like loving someone else. When you’re in a relationship, you don’t love everything they do. You don’t love that they take forever to text you back or that they’re always late or that they pick their toenails (I don’t know, I’m scrambling here.) But you love THEM, and you know that those things are part of them. So why can’t we love ourselves the same way? Self-love isn’t about adoring everything about yourself all the time. But it’s about accepting that your human moments are part of the package – and knowing that you have the right to have those moments. You have the right to have road rage or the world’s biggest chin pimple or hairy toes. They’re part of you just like your contagious laugh and your gorgeous eyes and your great sense of humor. It’s all part of the package.

So give self-love a try. It starts with self-acceptance. Start with the things that are easy to like about yourself. Do what makes you feel good – dress in your favorite clothes and get your nails done if that’s what makes you feel attractive, and love it. Then move on to the things you don’t like. It’s a constant journey, but I guarantee if you learn to accept yourself – the good and the bad – you will feel much more comfortable letting someone else in. After all, the most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one between you and yourself.

(Disclaimer: I am SO not shaming people who wear makeup or implying that they’re not being authentic. I LOVE makeup. Just do me a favor and make sure you’re wearing it for you and not for other people, okay? You’re gorgeous and I love you.)