The truism goes, you have to love your self before you can truly love another. I experienced this truism as 100% true the first time I realised I’d given the love I should’ve been giving to my self to another and wound up empty & unloved.
As I get older the love truisms develop in subtlety, complexity. For instance, the idea that before you can be a “We” there must be an “I” – a Self. This is very different from loving your self, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, becoming a confident person with goals and vision for her life. What I’m talking about is being deeply and utterly Self- centered and being okay with that. I mean really being okay with it. In a way that (most) men are born and raised knowing but (many) women aren’t. After all, if we were lucky enough to have escaped being mistaken for a parent’s appendage in childhood, society will socialize us out of putting our Self first.
He may not appreciate me telling you this, but marriage to my partner has taught me oodles about the importance of becoming more Self-centered. After all, I married a Leo. My Leo is awesome at putting himself first. He is most excellent at taking care of his own needs, whether at the dinner table talking about his day, or having a “John Night” every Wednesday night, he will make sure his social and physical needs are met. At one point in our marriage, the point right before I realized I was putting he and his Lion’s Pride’s needs before my own, I became deeply unhappy. Angry. I would voice my anger, despair, yet nothing would change. The more I insisted on my unhappiness, the more it reinforced his own insistence that he was perfectly happy. He couldn’t understand my frustration, he said. Why would he? I was meeting his needs; he was meeting his needs. For him, everything was working out brilliantly. As for me, I didn’t know how to put myself first. I literally wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up to compromise myself, sacrifice my own needs for others. It took lots of cognitive therapy and re-training. I am still training myself to be a Self.
I remember when I realized the problems in my marriage didn’t stem from his selfishness but from my lack of Self: that was a moment I started viewing my partner as a teacher. At my a-ha moment, “John is great at being selfish, at doing exactly what I need to learn to do,” John ceased to be my enemy- the person who always got what he wanted, and John became my model teacher, the person who always got what he wanted. I realized I coveted the way he always got what he wanted, from me, from life. I admired his easygoing assumption that other people wanted to make him happy, and that when they didn’t value him he could let them know. Of course living with your “teacher”, the person who is helping you learn one of your biggest life lessons, is a double-edged sword. He is sooo good at consistently reinforcing the fact that I need to meet his needs and put them first, I have to stay on my toes. It’s not his fault, really. He is a man, and he is a Leo. I am sure he is learning what he needs to learn from me, too. Back and forth in our relationship, over and over, in different permutations and forms, in multiple ways I get to experience firsthand that: You should and can have your needs, wants and desires met, but not at the expense of another. Not at the expense of my Self.
Here’s the thing: I am still married to the man I love. Even though I think we experienced a big crisis (of course it was small to him, because you see, nothing bothered him, being as madly in love with me as the day we first met), I did a lot of personal work, and in the end I became stronger because I began honouring my Self like I’d never done before. Even though I blamed him at first, the healing process required very little from him (though he was amazingly good at taking instruction and being open to doing what it took to make me happy) because it was mostly about me and my relationship to my Self. Couples counseling? Moot, if you don’t have a Self. Marriage takes two people, each with a whole Self. The idea of fixing another person never appealed to me, anyhow. Maybe we can each do much more for our ailing partnerships by working on our own wounds and core issues.
Aries is the archetype of selfhood, and ruling planet Mars. Mars and Aries gives us both the anger at being trespassed, and the courage, to claim a Self. We each have needs, wants, thoughts and desires that deserve honoring, no matter how inconvenient this is to others, and whether they like what we say, feel, want – or not. This bold Aries New Moon is conjunct Venus and Mars, highlighting our relations with others, with women, self-worth and value. Even next to sweet Venus, Aries does not wait for or have patience for the meek; with Mars you are either the courageous hunter or the prey. Only the strong survive.
We rarely think of a relationship as a battleground for Self-hood, but for many women living in patriarchal society, even if we do not consciously recognise it, it’s what marriage becomes. Through love and adversity, my marriage has made me stronger. It has also forever shaped the way I see gender. I have learned that when I Self-diminish, put my Self down, refrain from using my authentic voice, from asking for what I want, desire and need, it is not because I want to, but because as a woman I am taught, reinforced by culture, and sometimes my partner, to do this. Aries season is full of new ground to break and battles to fight, but as this lunation falls in my Seventh House I am celebrating freedom found in my biggest Aries victory to date: having a substantial Self.