I’ve spent a lot of time in the relationships classroom – after all this is a required course- and I must admit that there are certain lessons I’ve had to re-take many, many, many times.

Today’s lesson – learning that I do not need someone else to complete me and make me special.

For the past year or so I’ve been feeling like I’ve made a lot of progress in this area, but the test I had to take yesterday proves that I still have some work to do in order to master the lesson.

I have a friend for whom I have feelings which are more than platonic. It may or may not be a case of “unrequited love”. I’m not really sure. I don’t know whether or not he has expectations about the form our relationship might take in the future.

The reality is that it doesn’t really matter what he thinks about the future of our relationship. What matters right now is how I think about it.

Even though I often assert that I am modern woman who doesn’t have need for romantic frivolities, I’ve watched also watched my fair share of Julia Roberts romantic movies and like many people I have certain expectations of romance and relationships. Many of us expect our relationships to unfold like a 90 minute movie. You know the classic storyline; “boy meets girl – boy loses girl -boy realizes he can’t live without girl – boy declares undying love for girl -boy and girl live happily ever after”.

We believe that having someone fall in love with us is will make us special and whole and we are convinced that if we can get the movie ending to our story it will prove our worth. So we seek this kind of validation in our relationships. We look for someone to complete us. This implies that until we get our guy/gal we are incomplete. It also logically follows that if we get said guy/gal then lose them, we once again we become incomplete.

This puts some of us on a life-long roller coaster ride of finding and losing this illusive completion. Each time on the ride causes more damage to our already shaky sense of self-worth. Once we get the guy/gal, our focus then becomes about holding on to them at all costs. We become anxious, paranoid, suspicious and wary, waiting for someone to attempt to snatch them from us. We obsess about all the things conventional wisdom tells us we should do in order to convince them to stay with us, knowing that if we lose them we will once again be back to feeling incomplete and unworthy.

If you’re watched the movie Jerry Maguire, you probably remember the scene towards the end of the movie when Tom Cruise makes his declaration of undying love to Renee Zelwegger with the classic line. “I love you. You… you complete me. “ I confess that I still get the chills when I hear that line. This is what millions of us are longing to hear and longing to say. The hopes of an entire generation of women hang on the possibility of someday hearing those words and being able to say them back to someone. Apparently I’m not immune to this desire because yesterday this is what I wanted more than anything.

I got caught up in my own movie storyline. I wanted to be made to feel special. I wanted to hear what I wanted to hear, and when I didn’t all my insecurity kicked into high gear. The details aren’t important. What is important is the fact that I wanted to hear someone tell me that they loved me and that I completed them, because somehow that would then make me feel complete. How perverse. I wanted to feel special and I was looking to someone else to give me that feeling. I didn’t get what I wanted and as a result I felt really awful. I felt rejected, stupid, ugly, unlovable, unworthy, foolish, sad, mad, hurt. You get the gist. This is why looking for completion and a sense of being special in someone else is a trap that leads to all kinds of suffering. If you’re not constantly being validated or being told what you need to hear your insecurity will play havoc with your mind and emotions.

The craziest thing about this scenario is that the drama unfolded in my head unbeknown to the other person. Even if he had been aware of the movie script that I was running through in my head there’s still no guarantee that I would have heard what I wanted to hear. This is life. Its happened to me before and could certainly happen to me again. Anytime I’ve experienced rejection of this kind I’ve automatically assumed that it was proof positive of the fact that I’m unlovable. Clearly something must be wrong with me, otherwise why would I be rejected? I’d convince myself that this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been 10 pounds lighter. Or maybe if I was a little smarter, a little funnier, a little taller, a little sexier, a little more interesting, a little more…

The truth is I am more. In fact I am more than enough. We all are. Not because someone wants to be with us. Not because someone is in love with us. It’s not our husbands, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends that make us good enough. We are enough because we come into the world being whole and complete. We just forget and then end up living into the false idea that we need other peoples love and validation in order to be whole.

When we find a sense of our own completeness, we can come into our relationships in a way that is free of expectations, neediness and drama. In this state two people can come together not to complete each other, but to complement each other. Freeing ourselves from the need for validation will open us up fully to the experience of enjoying the true gifts of relationships that mirror back to us the highest version of who we truly are.

The ten million dollar question is how do we detach ourselves from this need to be validated by other people and how do we learn to honor our own specialness, independent of anyone else?

I believe the solution is simple. We have to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. Yes, I know its such a cliche. But thats the thing about cliches, they often carry within them basic truths. And while the idea of loving yourself is stunningly simple in logic, I also know that it can be hard to put into practice. Particularly when you first realize that you haven’t been loving yourself for your entire life. The pattern of looking for validation of our worthiness from other people is so deeply conditioned that we’re often not consciously aware of it. It’s only when you start to pay attention to yourself and your emotional reactions and patterns of behavior that you start to realize whats happening.

I have found that the easiest way to start is by just focusing on paying close attention to yourself. What I’m realizing for myself is that the lesson is gradually sinking in. Each time I have the kind of reaction that I did yesterday, the amount of time I stay stuck in a place of feeling badly gets shorter. This is progress. So while I still haven’t passed the final test on this particular lesson, I’m well on my way. Some day soon I’ll pass. I’ll master this lesson and realize that I finally have an unshakable sense of my own worth.