Self-Confidence Is the Foundation of Love and Happiness
The Buddha said: “From love comes sorrow; from love comes fear. One who is free from love is free from both sorrow and fear.” The Bodhisattva Kashyapa asked the Buddha: “How does one become free from love?” The Buddha replied: “With no perception of self, no perception of person, no perception of beings, no perception of lifespan—that is one who is free from love.”
—Gatha of King Manyakumina Seeking the Dharma
Romantic love is a temporary insanity that can be cured by marriage.
—Ambrose Bierce, American writer
Many people deeply relate to this Buddhist verse, because once they fall in love they are filled with worries and fears, and only after leaving a relationship can their hearts return to calm. But if they feel no love for a long time, they feel empty. So they are always searching for new partners, repeatedly failing in love, and left with one after another of emotional episodes they cannot bear to look back on.
Sorrow and fear are both negative emotions. In principle, love is sweet and should enhance well-being. In a relationship of mutual admiration and acceptance, there should not be an abundance of such negative emotions. But for people who are innately not self-confident, from the day they enter a romantic relationship their heart is ill at ease. Their heart swings between inferiority and arrogance; sometimes they feel unworthy of their partner's love, sometimes they feel their partner is unworthy of theirs. Their emotions are like a roller coaster and hard to settle.
Food and sex are human nature; love between the sexes is a natural law, and without it humankind would not have propagated to today. But love between the sexes is also the world's strongest emotion; once it arises between two people, it triggers massive secretion of various hormones, making the person extremely sensitive. Anyone in love has concern for love and fear of losing it; every word and deed of the partner tugs at the heart—all the more for highly sensitive people. Some people are even triggered by the stimulation of love into overtaking a mental illness.
The vast majority of people with smooth romantic and marital lives do not relate to this Buddhist verse; they do not feel love is the root of sorrow and terror. They enjoy the beautiful life experience love brings, which is why there are not many in this world who truly wish to leave home and become monastics. Because among the vast sea of people, self-confident people are still the largest proportion.
Moreover, inferiority and arrogance are not incurable. Once a partner who truly loves, understands, tolerates, and accepts—and never leaves—comes along, a partner's inferiority and arrogance can be healed and replaced by self-confidence. So such love is the only salvation for those lonely souls who struggle in constant pain.
Many people obsess over whether a love is “real” love, but this is actually meaningless. Every love given sincerely is real love; even if one day the two must part, they once truly loved each other. It is just that some loves cannot heal a person, while others can. Some people are innately confident and need little love to feel fulfilled. Some are innately inferior and need especially deep love to heal their inferiority. So each person's need for love differs.
When leaving a loving relationship, we need not blame the other person, because leaving simply means the relationship did not suit us and could not bring us to the state of love we wanted. It is neither the other's fault nor our own; it is simply that the love each needs does not match.
Usually, self-confident people cope with their lives more easily, so they do not need much from their partner to feel fulfilled. They are also willing to love, but they already love themselves well; they lack no love. They do not have high demands of their partner; as long as the partner is not too far out of line, they can accept the partner wholeheartedly. Moreover, self-confident people dare to express their own thoughts directly; they communicate frankly with their partners rather than resorting to hints. When conflicts arise, they trust that communication can resolve them; they do not use cold violence against their partner, let alone physical violence.
In psychology such people are called secure-attachers; they are the best spouses in romantic relationships. As long as the partner raises an emotional need, they usually try to fulfill it, unless the need is both unreasonable and unfair. Loving a secure-attacher is a very pleasant thing; even the so-called relationship-killers—avoidant, anxious, fearful, and ambivalent attachers—can, in loving a secure-attacher, harvest more pleasure and joy.
But perhaps life's greatest misfortune is that not everyone is born able to gain self-confidence. Some, because of genetic defects, may from the moment they become a fertilized egg be destined to find it hard to become self-confident. Their bodies have various physiological problems that cause them to suffer repeated failure in later competition, and these blows make it hard to build confidence. Others, because they were raised by caregivers with poor mental health, were constantly suppressed during growth; when the suppression reaches a certain degree, it also becomes hard to gain confidence.
Self-confidence is the result of growing up in an affirming yet unbiased environment from childhood. Psychological research shows that a person can build confidence only after receiving more than 5,000 affirmations in early childhood. Self-confidence is a stable emotion of self-affirmation; it differs from arrogance and conceit, which are unrealistic, overly high evaluations of oneself.
Moreover, arrogant and conceited people necessarily also harbor inferiority; their self-evaluation is unstable. At one moment they may be arrogant, the next moment inferior. This unstable self-evaluation makes their emotions extremely unstable. Their evaluation of others consequently fluctuates: sometimes they think others are wonderful and worth loving, sometimes they think others are terrible and not worth loving.
Self-confident people's self-evaluation is generally based on objective facts; even if occasionally it tends above the objective, they can adjust it in time through self-reflection. Some people with high self-expectation, as long as their self-perception is stable and they keep striving toward that expectation, count as very confident. They may work harder and be more optimistic than most, and ultimately achieve far more than most. But truly self-confident people do not look down on others because of their higher achievements; they pursue ideals simply because they love them, not to be superior. Truly self-confident people are egalitarians. Any behavior that discriminates against others is not healthy self-confidence but pathological conceit.
Self-confident people who grow up in different cultural environments do not behave exactly alike. In the Confucian cultural sphere, a confident person may appear outwardly very humble; confident people raised in Western culture appear more warm and direct, and are better at attracting others to cooperate and work with them. So there are many confident people among us Chinese, but our confident people are generally less cooperative than Westerners. Personally, I prefer confident people who are warm and direct, because dealing with them takes less effort. Whichever cultural environment one grows up in, as long as a person has a positive, affirming self-perception that is stable and unaffected by external circumstances, it is healthy.
Only when a person is in a state of mental health can they better manage their emotions. Self-confident people handle their feelings better. At the same time, when they suffer a breakup, they can let go more quickly, accept the fact, and not be deeply traumatized by it. Their confidence is not easily destroyed; they believe the breakup is simply because they were not suited, and a more fitting lover will appear.
We Chinese grow up in an environment lacking praise and affirmation. We now often talk about having cultural self-confidence, unaware that our traditional culture contains too much dross; it is precisely this dross that makes it hard for our children to develop a confident character. When a Chinese child hopes to walk the path of self-confidence, they are usually met with ridicule and suppression from those around them.
For example, we have a deep-seated belief that a person's beauty should be defined by others. We believe “beauty is not beautiful of itself; it is made manifest by others,” which causes many people not to build confidence at all but to people-please. True self-confidence is believing that one is beautiful as one is, regardless of whether others affirm it. We have a very clear, affirming, and stable perception of our own goodness—that is, of the various strengths we possess.
Moreover, our culture has a deep-seated gene of authority worship, which makes it hard for us to have a genuine sense of equality. Without a sense of equality, it is unlikely that most people will build self-confidence. We easily fall into power-worship and money-worship. My forty-plus years of life tell me that wherever we go, comparison culture and the worship of the strong are ubiquitous.
I am very reluctant to dine in groups. A big reason is that whether at family gatherings or with classmates and friends, the topic we discuss most is not personal hobbies, not reflections on the good life, but who has more power, who has more money, who is more outstanding. The utilitarianism at the table is hard to conceal; those with money, power, and ability always get more respect.
This deformed culture harms everyone without their knowing it. Most of us live our whole lives in a state of needing others to affirm ourselves, while others mostly measure a person's worth by money, looks, power, and personal achievement. Only the most resolute, self-confident, and calm can resist this ubiquitous toxic environment.
Our lack of confidence also shows in our inability to entertain any critical thought toward the opinions offered by authority. I have felt this most deeply in TCM circles: many people, after studying TCM, treat the ancient classics with reverence, and even when facts recorded in them do not match objective history, they dare not question. So our so-called “scholars” can hardly call themselves scholars; they are merely memorizing successors, who dare not question their predecessors or authorities, and dare not innovate.
A large part of the reason is that if they dare innovate, they will be reviled by a host of people. In academia, only truly self-confident people dare to risk universal condemnation and innovate. This cultural environment of ours means that over the last two or three centuries, many major scientific discoveries were not made by us Chinese. At least in modern times, our Chinese nation's ability to survive and protect itself has been insufficient; because of this lack of innovation we fell behind, were beaten, sacrificed many compatriots, and suffered much humiliation.
A self-confident person does not care about others' negative evaluations, nor even about their intimate partner's. This is not to say we should not accept criticism, but that self-confident people do not have big emotional swings when criticized; they objectively reflect on whether the problem the partner points out actually exists, taking the attitude of “if I have it, correct it; if not, take it as a warning.” So self-confident people do not collapse over a partner's every word or deed in a relationship, whereas inferior or arrogant people easily fall into extreme emotion, making their romantic and marital relationships more fragile.
Everyone has their own unique side, so everyone has the right to be self-confident. We should see our own good side and affirm ourselves. If someone mocks our self-affirmation, we can ignore or scorn that mockery. Toward those who long suppress and belittle us, we should have the courage to say: your suppression and belittling of me are wrong; I will not be influenced by you. I am who I am; I have my strengths, and I am not as worthless as you say. Even if I do have some small flaws, I am still beautiful.
When we see others being self-confident, we should not accuse them of narcissism. Using the pedantic, backward notion that “beauty is not beautiful of itself” to view self-confidence is itself a sign of inferiority. Anyone can, and has the right to, say firmly to themselves and to the world: “I have a good side; I deserve the life I want; I will strive for my ideals; I need not live by your evaluation.”
Only when a person has true self-confidence, and can bring themselves much joy, do they possess abundant vitality; they are also more likely to gain others' trust and love. We have all had the experience: being around a vital person makes us feel more vital ourselves. Vitality is the most important positive force in living things. Everyone dies; during the time we are alive, being vital makes our lives more wonderful. Those full of vitality are usually the hardest to knock down when facing difficulties. The world also always favors them, granting them more abundant survival resources and interpersonal resources.
If we are not confident enough, remember to give ourselves several ringing self-affirmations every day, repeating the process persistently until our hearts are full of strength. One day, when the strength within us is so abundant that we no longer depend on the outside and can keep our own countenance, earning a living and finding love will become much easier.
Self-confident people need no applause from others, because they already live in contentment and self-sufficiency; but the inferior and the arrogant do. If we want to rid ourselves of inferiority and arrogance, and no one is applauding us, then let us applaud ourselves!