Loving Yourself Before Loving Others

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I've heard that in order to have a relationship with somebody, you have to love yourself. I've been trying to figure out this statement for a while, and it's been bugging me. I want to figure this out. I'm tired of being lonely and I want to get rid of this desperate mentality (that I don't want to show in front of women). How does someone even start on the road to loving themselves?

Side-note: The clubs and groups at my college, are, well, not that much of interest to me...they focus on interests that just aren't me.

I don't understand what people mean by "love yourself". My mother used to tell me I didn't love myself. I don't know what she was talking about. Maybe it is something people say when you don't show a lot of emotion or if they think you are not confident. Don't let people tell you that you don't love yourself. They don't know what is going on inside your mind.

Loving yourself is easier than you think, Of course that doesn't mean be in love with yourself.
The correct words to use here is:
Listen to your thoughts and don't judge them. Do your best not to listen to the negative thoughts. Let the positive energy flow through instead. The negative thoughts usually force you to dislike yourself. The positive thoughts are much more encouraging anyway.

I know a lot of guys who desperately want a girlfriend and they seem to complain about their lack of one a lot. I read a few of the pages in the link on your signature, and they all describe this type of guy. He's the one everyone knows would help them out if they asked for it, heck he'll even offer it unprompted, even if no one ever gives any help in return. No one wants to date a pushover, or someone who codependently needs to feel needed because they can't bear to feel their own feelings. You need to prioritize your needs and your happiness, and until you can be happy on your own, no one will want to get too close to you. Unless of course they are a serial user and take advantage of this type of person all the time.
What are your interests? I met my boyfriend at college and was attracted to him because he had his own thing going on. Instead of trying out a lot of different clubs he wasn't interested in, he started a new one. He spent a lot of time developing his talents and never formed an opinion without having reasons to back them up. He was very self assured and although I know he felt lonely during this time, he never complained. He expressed interest in girls and even dated a friend of mine, but they worked better as friends. If he had clung on to her just because she was the first girl to show any interest in him, I never would have had the chance to be with him. We didn't have as much in common in college as we do now, but he always encouraged me to question authority and engaged me with tact and compassion. At the time he didn't fit my skewed picture of an ideal guy, but we were good friends and I later came to value this much more in a potential relationship. If he had stayed in his room all day instead of hanging out frequently in the lobby, making a few new friends, I never would have gotten to know his character.
I dated a lot of needy guys in college, but their ego was so inflated that I couldn't tell until I was already emotionally involved. They just happened to be the only guys who pursued me and weren't clingons. It took me til my mid twenties to realize the pattern in my dating choices, and I resolved to stop letting my emotions and hormones rule who I dated. I chose my boyfriend with my brain this time and I have never been happier. You might want to start looking at older girls or just work on yourself for a while. Make friends along the way and figure out what it means to be an equal partner in a relationship. Most people end up dating people in their proximity, friends or friends of friends.

Still trying to sort this out with myself.

It mostly has to deal with how can you cope with your feelings towards another person. If you are completely dependent on another, there really is no way for you to cope with any differences between each other. All the feelings associated with loving another, a relationship, and marrying someone can be very overwhelming. I doubt any relationship is going to be all sunshine and daisies. It is looking at a very serious commitment that takes effort to make work.

You also need to be mature and capable of living on your own, without much outside help. Not running back to your parents every time you need something.

And some might say it helps to love Jesus too. First time going to a church in a while and of all sermons...

See I don't understand this either.. I view negative thoughts as simply part of who I am. They 1) Keep me from getting into trouble "Don't do that, you'll get hurt", and every time I ignore them.. lo and behold.. i get hurt. 2) Positive thoughts when I have them are often totally unworkable and always lead to disappointment because they overwhelmingly depend on everything precisely falling into place at exactly the right time, perfect example.. I went out one day.. hit every green light in town.. and I knew.. KNEW something bad was going to happen.. that night my best-friend/fiance dumped me. That's just how my life works, no amount of positive thought is going to change that. 3) I can go and hang around loads of people, I get nervous, I get anxious, I don't talk to people, I look and feel awkward.. and unless some one else initiates contact with me I don't just approach people.. as far as I'm concerned I'm butting into their conversation or their personal space by speaking to people I don't know. 4) I have nothing to offer. I'm not special, I talk down to people I don't like because my intelligence is really the only thing I have going for me, and I basically hate anything that is popular. 90% of my interests are heavily male dominated. Seriously.. trying to meet girls at gaming conventions or metal concerts is basically impossible. No amount of positivism is going to make a load of cute single girls suddenly be interested in that stuff... though it does seem to be getting better for the younger generations.

As I've said many times before, when stuff starts going the way I want it to in my life, then I'll have a reason to have a smile on my face and be positive about my life. From June to November of last year, I was the happiest Motherf***er on the planet.. EVERYTHING was going right. I got my license finally, I got a car, I was doing really well in school, I had made a ton of new friends, I had an intelligent beautiful best-friend/girlfriend/fiance who told me she loved me every morning and told me she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.. I felt as though I, or her and I together, could conquer any problem we faced.. sure we were broke.. but we can get jobs! we had no privacy.. we can get our own place! NOTHING seemed insurmountable.. But then it all fell apart... My car died.. my best friend dumped me.. my friends abandoned me.. and all I could think was "This is what you get for getting your hopes up".

Being confident in who you are is my guess.

The way I see it you dont have to be comfortable with every aspect of yourself but you have to at least have come to terms with your image/whatever flaws you have.


Why?
Based on my own experience coming to terms with myself:
Almost nobody with good intentions will fall for someone that is having problems with themselves because every time you compliment someone they try to refute your compliment, whenever you do something nice for them they question your motives ....

I tend to go "ehhhh" at this kind of advice. Being perfectly ok with yourself does nothing to change the fact that the rest of the neurotypical world isn't, and everything tends to hinge on that. I tried the "be ok with myself" route for years and it lead to...a dry spell lasting about that very same amount of time. I didn't start getting anywhere until I started reprogramming myself into a more NT-friendly version, something that I'll always be exceedingly resentful about.

It's a mixture of what rabbittss and Shau said in my case.

It's fine to be okay with yourself, but what good does that do if others aren't okay with you?

And then there's the catch-22 of pretty much needing to be loved before you can love yourself in the first place. Some people are so downtrodden and bereft of love that they just can't love themselves. They wonder if anybody could love them, even if they know they're good people.

And of course, my own case is that I can't even get along with people that share my interests, and if I tried what jackie said (starting my own club) no one would ever join. So that's out the window.

I agree, Shau. Hell, I used to be much more positive about everything, even though life was always a living hell. But along the way, I started to learn that if I wanted to live my life without going utterly insane, then being negative was the way to go. My life hasn't gotten any better, granted, however, I've avoided snapping at others (not to mention going utterly batshit insane) and over time, I gained kind of a thick skin towards situations that would drive others to suicide.

A lot of people that will tell you that you have to love yourself are indeed people who have been lucky in that regard, and really have no reason to foist that advice off onto others. And even for people who changed their attitude and became positive after being negative, and then found somebody I like to think that them changing their attitude isn't really what did it. It just doesn't add up to me. After all, if this was the case, why are so many negative people in relationships. Why are people who are WORSE than negative in relationships, at that? Misogynists, rapists, child molesters, a lot of the scum of the earth are married or with somebody (I'm not trying to liken negativity to these things, rather trying to show why telling somebody that simply being negative isn't really a deterrent for being in a relationship). Confidence isn't the end all be all either. If you're handsome and confident, fine, that'll work out. But somebody who's lower on the looks scale who is confident will simply be called a narcissist or talked about behind his back by the majority of people. It's no good.