We often hear that love is about putting other people first. We are encouraged to be caring, understanding, patient and willing to make sacrifices for the people who matter to us. And, of course, these qualities can be an important part of a loving relationship.
But there is a question we do not always stop to consider: Can you truly love another person if you do not really know yourself?
It is possible to care deeply about someone whilst feeling uncertain about who you are. You might spend years trying to make another person happy, adjusting your behaviour to avoid conflict or shaping yourself around what you believe they want you to be. From the outside, your relationship might even look wonderful.
Yet, somewhere beneath all that effort, you may begin to lose touch with yourself.
What happens when the person you are trying so hard to love never really gets to know the person you are?
This is where the relationship between selfhood and authentic love becomes important. And it is a question that connects closely with the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, particularly his exploration of the self in The Sickness Unto Death.
1. When Love Becomes a Way of Escaping Yourself
Sometimes, our desire to be loved is so strong that we begin to change ourselves to secure it.
We become the agreeable partner who never complains. The friend who is always available, even when exhausted. The parent who feels guilty whenever they take time for themselves. We learn to say what others want to hear, hide the feelings that might cause disagreement and quietly push our own needs aside.
At first, this might feel like love.
We tell ourselves that we are being considerate, that relationships require compromise and that making sacrifices is simply part of caring for someone. And there is truth in that. Love does involve patience, generosity and a willingness to meet another person halfway.
But there is a difference between making a loving compromise and abandoning yourself to keep someone else happy.
When you constantly suppress your own thoughts, feelings and values, you may gradually lose sight of what you actually want. You might become so accustomed to asking, “What will make them happy?” that you forget to ask, “What do I genuinely feel?”
Eventually, the relationship can become less about two people meeting each other honestly and more about maintaining a version of yourself that you believe will be accepted.
You may be giving someone everything you have whilst keeping the most honest parts of yourself hidden.
And that raises an uncomfortable question: if you are afraid to let another person see who you really are, how much of your relationship is built on genuine connection, and how much is built on the need to be accepted?
2. The Difference Between Being Loved and Being Needed
There is another subtle difficulty that can arise when we do not know ourselves.
We may begin to depend on other people’s affection to tell us who we are.
If someone praises us, we feel worthwhile. If they become distant, we begin to question our value. If they are pleased with us, we feel secure. If they are disappointed, we might feel as though we have somehow failed as a person.
Our sense of identity becomes tied to how other people respond to us.
This can make relationships emotionally exhausting. Instead of simply enjoying another person’s company, we may spend our time looking for reassurance that we are still wanted, still appreciated and still good enough.
We might even confuse being needed with being loved.
Being needed can feel comforting because it gives us a role. We are the person who fixes everything, the one who keeps everyone together or the one who always knows what to say. But if our entire identity depends on fulfilling that role, what happens when someone no longer needs us in the same way?
Who are we when we are not solving somebody else’s problems?
Who are we when we are not receiving praise?
Who are we when another person disagrees with us?
These questions matter because authentic relationships require more than simply fulfilling a function in somebody else’s life. They involve meeting another person as a person, with our own thoughts, responsibilities, values and imperfections.
Love becomes difficult when we are so frightened of losing someone’s affection that we no longer feel free to be honest.
3. What Kierkegaard Teaches Us About the Self
In The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard explores what it means to become a self.
For Kierkegaard, the self is not simply a collection of personality traits, preferences or social roles. It is something we must continually relate to and take responsibility for. Becoming yourself involves confronting the tension between different aspects of existence, including possibility and necessity, freedom and limitation.
This has an important connection with relationships.
If you have not developed an honest relationship with yourself, you may find it difficult to relate honestly to another person. You might rely on their approval to establish your identity, or allow their expectations to determine the person you believe you should become.
Kierkegaard’s discussion of despair helps us understand this struggle. Despair is not merely sadness or disappointment. It concerns a troubled relationship with the self.
One form of despair involves not wanting to be oneself. Another involves attempting to be oneself entirely through one’s own power, without acknowledging the deeper conditions on which the self depends.
Applied to relationships, this offers a way of thinking about the person who tries to become whatever somebody else desires, as well as the person who refuses to acknowledge their own limitations or need for others.
Both can struggle to accept the task of becoming a self.
The point is not that you must achieve perfect self-knowledge before you can love. Nobody knows themselves completely. We are constantly discovering new things about our character, our motivations and the ways we respond to the world.
Rather, the challenge is to stop treating yourself as someone who must be hidden, manufactured or endlessly adjusted to earn affection.
Authentic love does not require you to have everything figured out. It requires a willingness to be honest about the person you are becoming.
4. You Cannot Build Genuine Intimacy on Pretence
Think about a relationship in which you never feel comfortable expressing disagreement.
You might love your partner deeply, but you always agree with their opinions because you are afraid of upsetting them. You avoid discussing your worries because you do not want to appear difficult. You hide your ambitions because they might interfere with the life you have built together.
Over time, you may become very good at maintaining peace.
But peace and intimacy are not necessarily the same thing.
A relationship can appear peaceful simply because one person has stopped expressing what they really think. Disagreements disappear, but so does the opportunity to understand one another more deeply.
Genuine intimacy involves allowing another person to encounter the parts of you that are not always convenient or easy to understand.
That does not mean saying everything that comes into your head without considering the consequences. Honesty still requires kindness, respect and responsibility. Nor does it mean that you must disclose every private thought or feeling.
It means being able to express your genuine needs, boundaries, beliefs and concerns without constantly pretending to be someone else.
For example, there is a meaningful difference between saying:
“I don’t mind what we do. Whatever you want is fine.”
And saying:
“I’d really like to do something different this weekend. Could we find something we both enjoy?”
The second response allows both people to exist within the relationship. It creates space for discussion rather than quietly removing one person’s preferences from the equation.
When you know yourself better, you become more capable of communicating what matters to you. And when both people can do this, the relationship has a greater opportunity to become a meeting between two real individuals rather than two carefully maintained performances.
5. Knowing Yourself Does Not Mean Putting Yourself First All the Time
There is a danger in misunderstanding the importance of selfhood.
We might assume that knowing ourselves means prioritising our own desires above everyone else’s. We might decide that being authentic means never compromising, never changing our minds and refusing to accept anything that challenges our personal preferences.
But that is not what authentic selfhood needs to mean.
Knowing yourself also involves recognising your limitations, questioning your assumptions and accepting responsibility for the way you treat others.
Perhaps you discover that you become defensive whenever somebody criticises you. Perhaps you realise that you use humour to avoid difficult conversations. Maybe you notice that you expect your partner to understand your feelings without ever explaining them.
These discoveries can be uncomfortable.
However, self-knowledge is not simply about identifying what makes you feel good. It is also about being willing to confront the aspects of yourself that make relationships harder than they need to be.
A person who knows themselves is not necessarily a person who always gets things right. They are someone who is increasingly willing to acknowledge their mistakes, listen to others and take responsibility for their actions.
That kind of self-awareness can make room for a more generous form of love.
You can compromise without resentment because you understand what you are choosing. You can apologise without feeling that your entire identity is under attack. You can respect another person’s independence without interpreting it as a rejection of your own worth.
Selfhood is not the enemy of love. It can help make love more honest, responsible and freely given.
6. Healthy Love Allows Two People to Become Themselves
A healthy relationship does not require two people to become identical.
You can have different interests, disagree about certain things and still share a meaningful connection. You can support another person’s ambitions without abandoning your own. You can be close without needing to control every aspect of their life.
In fact, the ability to remain yourself whilst loving another person can make a relationship more meaningful.
Consider the difference between these two attitudes:
- “I need you to be exactly who I want you to be so that I can feel secure.”
- “I want to understand who you are, even when your experiences and perspectives differ from mine.”
The first attitude can turn love into an attempt to manage uncertainty. The second creates room for curiosity, communication and mutual respect.
Of course, relationships are not always straightforward. People sometimes hurt one another, misunderstand each other or struggle to accept changes. Knowing yourself does not guarantee that every relationship will succeed.
Nor does it mean that you must remain in a relationship that is harmful or consistently disregards your boundaries.
But it can help you recognise the difference between a relationship that challenges you to grow and one that repeatedly asks you to deny who you are.
You do not have to disappear to prove that you love someone.
And the person who loves you should not have to disappear either.
7. Becoming Yourself Is Part of Learning to Love
Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that self-knowledge is not a task you complete once and then leave behind.
You will continue to change.
Your priorities may shift. Your understanding of love may deepen. Experiences may reveal fears or assumptions you did not previously recognise. The person you are today will not be exactly the same as the person you become in ten years.
This is why authentic relationships require ongoing honesty.
You need to remain curious about yourself, but you also need to remain curious about the person you love. Neither of you should be reduced to an old description of who you used to be.
Sometimes, loving another person means having the courage to say, “I have changed, and I need to understand what that means for us.”
At other times, it means listening when the other person says something similar.
These conversations can be difficult, but they allow relationships to develop alongside the people within them.
Instead of demanding that love remain unchanged, you begin to understand that genuine connection involves meeting each other again and again.
And that requires two people who are willing to be present, honest and open to growth.
So, Can You Love Others Without Knowing Yourself?
Yes, you can care for another person deeply without having complete self-knowledge. Love does not suddenly become possible only after you have solved every question about your identity.
You can love whilst you are confused. You can love whilst you are still learning to communicate. You can love whilst working through fears, insecurities and uncertainty.
But there is a difference between loving someone whilst you are becoming yourself and using a relationship to avoid becoming yourself altogether.
When you continually abandon your values, hide your feelings or depend entirely on another person’s approval, it becomes harder to build a relationship grounded in honesty and mutual understanding.
The aim is not to become perfectly independent or completely self-sufficient. Nor is it to make yourself the centre of every relationship.
It is to develop a more honest relationship with yourself, so that you can meet another person without constantly pretending, performing or asking them to determine your worth.
Perhaps authentic love begins with a simple but challenging willingness:
To be seen as you are, rather than as you think you need to be.
To recognise the other person as they are, rather than as you want them to be.
And to understand that love is not about two people losing themselves in one another, but about two people learning how to stand honestly within a relationship.
You do not need to know yourself perfectly before you can love. But the more honestly you learn to relate to yourself, the more room you may create for a love that allows both people to become who they truly are.
Explore The Sickness Unto Death
What does it mean to become yourself? Why do we sometimes run from our own identity, and how can we develop a more honest relationship with who we are?
These are some of the questions explored in Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death.
Discover The Sickness Unto Death: A Modern Translation for the 21st Century and explore its ideas about selfhood, despair, faith and what it means to become a self in the modern world.