CREDIT: PROVIDED BY JUVERIYA IRFANAFMED MOMBASAWALA
Loving yourself, is loving the world.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner and the media is hyped up about the ways to celebrate with someone special.

An individual almost feels pressured to have a partner to celebrate this day, but this Valentine’s Day, challenge yourself to know and love yourself better. As the saying goes, “you can never love anyone, unless you love yourself first.” This may be easily said than done but plays a major role in every individual’s life.

If you are single or in a relationship take a step back to know yourself. Learning to love and respect yourself is the only way you’ll be able to love someone else.


Every relationship you have in your life revolves around how you treat yourself. If you don’t respect yourself or give importance to your own opinion, no one else ever will. The majority of the time, people get used to having someone around them, someone that they can rely on for their approvals or get justification from to make themselves feel better. But the fact is no individual should feel the need of getting approval about how they feel and what they want to pursue in life from anyone. You should love yourself enough to be content with your approval.

Having said that, achieving pure self-love is a long journey but every step you take is a step taken towards a better you. This Valentine’s Day, take out an hour of your day doing something that you genuinely enjoy doing, without depending on your friend to join you. Spending some time alone with books, or treating yourself with food that you love, or shopping for yourself are activities that will make you realize that you are enough for yourself.

You are in full power of making yourself happy. This will also help you develop respect for yourself and you will have standards of how you let people treat you.

Currently, even if you are in a relationship or single, practising self-love will drastically change your outlook on life. We have lots of international students on Fanshawe campus who travel far away from their home country, or domestic students who are away from their hometown. They are away from everything they know, and scared for how they’ll be treated in a new city.

What they don’t realize is they are gifting themselves one of the best tools to strengthen themselves and love themselves for who they are. Spend time alone in your dorm room, rather than drifting away in negative thoughts, do activities that give you happiness from within; this is the best time to know yourself. And after you do that, you’ll find the friends and the partner you deserve or the friends or your current partner will start loving you the way you are because you love yourself for who you are.

In this digital world of social media, approval from people you don’t even know or barely know has become a new big thing. Practising self-love and working on mental health has been ignored by most of the individuals and this is affecting our day-to-day lives. Thus, this Valentine’s Day, realize your importance and get yourself a bunch of flowers with your favourite chocolates, even if you are still celebrating with a partner or are single. Self-love is important at every stage of a human’s life.