How can you love your partner more than yourself

Why would you want to do that? It's not healthy.
The most important relationship ever in life is the one with yourself. So you should always love yourself most and put your happiness and well-being first. That way you also have overflow from which to give to others.
If you love others more than yourself you don't have anything to give. You are depleting yourself, undermining your well-being and health.
Then, if it goes wrong, and it usually does with such connections, you are left with nothing. No self-love, nothing. Just the empty feeling, exhaustion, and thinking/feeling "I gave them everything and they left me????"

Just don't go there. Work on self-love, then and only then can you love another in a healthy way, and only then do you have something to offer.

I saw a sentence the other day I would die for you if I love you. Is it only lip service? If one loves others more than himself, that means he doesn’t love himself?

I rather agree with Crystal, give away the overflow love
but be sure you are covered first.

You can love doing for them more than yourself.
You can also love how they make you feel.

It may be a learned skill I think ;-)

It is hard to love others, if you don't love yourself. It is all about the right balance, which can even change from situation from situation.

Well if there are any saber tooth tigers about. The protective instinct is an expression of that on one level. But on most levels, self love is linked closely with feelings of self worth.
Yea you need a balance..

Otherwise you may be dangling from someones little finger. As it were.
I mean if any finger is doing the dangling I want it to be mine.
You know?

Unless one loves themselves first & most, then loving someone else will never be true love...

One can always have plenty to share.... but if you don't take care of yourself no one else will bring you the satisfaction you can by taking care of yourself first..

I read a post by a new mom. She said her husband did what he could to help her even something she thought the most dirtiest she would never do after her delivering their baby. She said she was so lucky to have him as a partner.

What people do for their offspring to keep them safe is entirely different. That is primal instinct of survival of the species.
And men of course do that too to protect the one who carries and nurtures their offspring as well as their offspring themselves.
That part for the mother may change as the child(ren) grow older.
AGain to do with that same primal instinct to protect as in very old days, where we needed those instincts, a man could not keep his baby alive if the woman died.

I also saw some men are too selfish or they haven’t learned how to love others all they care the most is their own benefits even their women need them the most

What they need is an attack by a saber tooth tiger, to wake them up..

Sure. Many people have problems with opening their hearts and loving, women as well.
That's because many haven't worked on issues like self-esteem, feeling worthy of love and so on. Most will think and say they feel worthy to receive love, but it's not about words, it's about energy, deeper down.
Typically these are childhood wounds (inner child wounds) and relationships gone wrong add to that.

I f***ing LLLLOOOOVVVEEEE me!!!

This doesn't quite feel right to me. Loving one's partner more than oneself doesn't seem functionally possible.

I can certainly see one partner loving more than the other partner, but I don't think it's really possible to love someone else more than oneself.

It's the practical side of it that I'm not seeing. How can we measure and compare love for the self with love for someone else?

I have of course known many people who DID MORE for their partner than they did for themselves, plenty of people who sacrificed themselves to save their partner even.

But all the cases I've witnessed where someone in a less dramatic fashion, were said to functionally "love" their partner more than themselves in a day-to-day, moment to moment way, the reality has always been very unhealthy, and NEVER resembled anything that I or especially the partner who was thus "loved," experienced as feeling they were loved.

One example I'm thinking of, was a real person I knew who was literally starving himself in order to pay for fun things for his child. On the surface, that might SOUND like "loved his child more than himself," but as I pointed out to him (and successfully persuaded him to stop doing it), what he was really doing was killing himself entirely unnecessarily, and depriving his child of his protection and help for all the time AFTER he became unable to function due to ill health.

I've seen plenty of people who claimed to love someone more than they loved themselves in other unhealthy situations as well. Stalkers come to mind as an obvious example. Such people certainly SAY they "love" their target, but since the target never ASKED for their "love" or sacrifice, it sure didn't look like love to anyone else.

It's confusing, because self-sacrifice is so often an act of ultimate selfishness. That is, the person who "sacrifices" themselves, is declaring that THEIR PERSONAL sense of what love means, is going to overrule what their own claimed lover wants.

By playing with how you subjectively define and understand what is "love."


Maybe. Maybe not.
That's why communication is important in a relationship.
That's how you figure out what is/isn't lip service to your own satsifaction.
(And most communication, the most important aspects of communication, aren't what comes out of the mouth or through the fingertips online)

I would want someone to love me this much...

I'd catch a grenade for ya (yeah yeah)
Throw my head on a blade for ya (yeah yeah)
I'd jump in front of a train for ya (yeah yeah)
You know I'd do anything for ya (yeah yeah)
Oh whoa oh
I would go through all this pain
Take a bullet straight through my brain
Yes I would die for you baby
But you won't do the same
No no no no

- Grenade (Bruno Mars)


a tad too much maybe?


Back to OT: Yes it is possible to love someone more that you love yourself, but that would not be a good scenario. The other person might take you for granted even cheat on you because he knew you loved him and would forgive him. In other words, the other person might walk all over you. And you don't want that, do you?

my two cents

My ex wanted me to literally walk all over her. When she wanted me to crack her back, she wanted me to stand on her back. I didn't like that because you can really cause some damage doing that. I don't even like doing the thing where one crosses their arms and you lift them from behind. IDK, just seems too risky to me. I did like to give her a back massage and crack her back that way. It was nice, intimate, and safe... and it worked.

well now that she is your ex, don't you wish at times that you did walk all over her. Just asking because you had mentioned many times in the forums you were feeling so bad when she took your kids away from you. None of my business? ok then, I apologize.

I me.

Die for your partner