zandd.com: You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you. I don't remember where I had heard this statement, but it wasn't until recently that these words made so much sense to me. I had gone through a breakup, and every time I go through one of these, I have a time of reflection. I try to figure out where it all went wrong, what my role in it was, and what happened exactly. It usually helps to give me closure and realize things that I may have been blinded to.

This time, the breakup was particularly painful, and I won't bore you with details, but I took it badly. It was a slow breakup, the kind that just drags on and on, delaying the inevitable, but still giving enough foresight to know that an end is inevitable.

This slow breakup, though, did give me time to reexamine things. In the midst of all this, I came to the conclusion that while this was not all my fault, it was partially my fault (as with most breakups, it takes two to tango, so to speak). Simply, I had lost myself in the relationship.

In the relationship, I let him take over and I gave up many opinions and became so passive. After a while, I just didn't recognize myself, and apparently neither did he. We were both so unhappy in the relationship. We both felt lost and frustrated. I wasn't the person who he had gone out with and who he had come to want to be with.

We used to have great arguments. They weren't really arguments, but were more like debates. We used to argue and hold our own because we both had the notion that each of our points were right. After a while of our being together, I had lost that. I gave up fighting and just agreed with him.

I was trying to conform myself to him. I tried to become what I thought he wanted me to be. Looking back, it was foolish. He wanted the person who I was, not the person I became. Ironic that I tried to please him and ended up doing the one thing that could break us up.

In the end, I realized that I was trying to live up to the image of what I thought he wanted me to be. I didn't show my vulnerable side; I was "strong" with him. I didn't reveal my human side. To be human, in my definition, you need to have all aspects and emotions, and I wasn't that with him; I was only an image.

One thing that I learned from this experience was to always be true to my own self. There are going to be things about me that are not agreeable with everyone. But if I can't be myself with someone, how can they honestly care for me when it is not even me?

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