Balancing self-love and a healthy relationship is very important for your own inner peace. It’s so easy to get caught up in codependency in a relationship, especially if you do not love yourself. Although loving yourself is a journey on its own and does not happen overnight, balancing the relationship you have with yourself while in a relationship with another person should be a top priority.

As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself mourning a childhood that I feel I never had due to rocky relationships with my family. My parents never gave me a good model of what a loving and healthy relationship looked like, and frequent arguments with my mom gradually eroded our bond.

The first night that I moved into my new apartment alone, I set up my projector, threw on Gilmore Girls, and cried into the Honolulu chicken that I had ordered from Hawaiian Bros, a flimsy plastic fork the only piece of silverware that I had. As I looked around at the precariously stacked boxes dotting my floor, I realized that while loneliness was a semi-constant state for me, I was now truly and positively alone.

In recent weeks, I’ve been more spontaneous than I felt ever possible. I’ve defied my personal rules about falling in love after meeting the most perfect boy with the purest little heart; i’ve returned to the old and completed aspects of my life on a whim after creating an new identity 1000km away, gave myself over to the serious commitments of that old life again, and am now having to grapple with the decision of betraying those new commitments.