Kat McAdaragh

The difference between self-acceptance and self-romance

We’ve all been told we need to love ourselves more. Stand in front of the mirror and feel overwhelming affection for what you see. Write yourself love letters. Plan romantic dates with yourself. Feel the kind of warm, protective, “I would do anything for you” feeling that you have for people you actually love.

But what if that’s setting the bar impossibly high? What if the problem isn’t that we don’t love ourselves enough—it’s that we’re aiming for the wrong thing entirely?

Maybe we don’t need to be in love with ourselves. Maybe we just need to like ourselves enough to want to spend time in our own company without constantly wanting to escape.

There’s a difference between loving yourself and liking yourself, and honestly, I think liking yourself might be more important—and definitely more achievable—than the grand romance with yourself that wellness culture keeps pushing.

The Love Yourself Pressure

The self-help world is obsessed with self-love. You’re supposed to fall head-over-heels for yourself, to look in the mirror and feel butterflies, to write yourself love letters and plan romantic dates with yourself. The language around self-acceptance has become so intense that anything less than passionate self-adoration feels like failure.

But here’s the thing: most of us don’t love ourselves the way we love our favorite people, and that’s actually normal. Think about it—love is a pretty intense emotion. It involves idealization, devotion, and a willingness to overlook flaws. When you love someone, you see them through rose-colored glasses. You focus on their best qualities and forgive their worst ones.

Expecting to feel that way about yourself sets up an impossible standard. You know yourself too well to idealize yourself. You’re aware of every petty thought, every moment of weakness, every time you’ve fallen short of your own expectations. You can’t unsee your complexity the way you can overlook it in others.

Maybe that’s not a problem to be solved. Maybe that’s just the reality of being human.

What Liking Yourself Means

Liking yourself is more practical than loving yourself. It’s about basic compatibility rather than passionate devotion. You like people you enjoy being around, people whose company feels comfortable and easy, people don’t have to perform for.

Liking yourself means you don’t constantly criticize your own thoughts and feelings. It means you give yourself the benefit of the doubt when you make a mistake. It means you treat yourself with the same basic kindness you’d show a friend who was having a hard time.

It’s less about thinking you’re amazing and more about thinking you’re terrible. It’s less about celebration and more about tolerance. It’s the difference between “I’m incredible” and “I’m okay, and that’s enough.”

When you like yourself, you don’t need to escape from your own mind all the time. You can sit with your thoughts without immediately reaching for distractions. You can be alone without feeling lonely or bored or desperate for stimulation.

The Inner Roommate Test

I’ve started thinking about self-acceptance in terms of what I call the “inner roommate test.” If the voice in your head were your actual roommate, would you want to live with them?

Some people’s inner voices are like that roommate who constantly criticizes everything you do, points out all your flaws, and reminds you of every mistake you’ve ever made. They’re exhausting to be around, and you’d probably start looking for a new place pretty quickly.

Other people have developed inner voices that are more like good roommates—generally supportive, occasionally honest about things that need to change, but not cruel or relentless about it. They notice when you’re struggling and offer comfort instead of criticism.

The goal isn’t to turn your inner voice into your biggest fan who thinks everything you do is perfect. The goal is to make it someone you can actually stand to live with for the rest of your life.

The Criticism Spiral

One of the biggest obstacles to liking yourself is the habit of criticism addiction. You know what I mean—that tendency to obsess over everything you did wrong, said wrong, or thought wrong throughout the day. It’s like having a mental highlight reel that only shows your worst moments.

I used to replay conversations over and over, focusing on every awkward pause or stupid comment. I’d analyze my appearance in every mirror, cataloging everything that was wrong or different or not quite right. I’d review my work performance like a harsh critic, always finding ways I could have done better.

This isn’t self-awareness or self-improvement—it’s self-torture disguised as productivity. Real self-awareness includes noticing your strengths and neutral qualities, not just your weaknesses. Real self-improvement comes from a place of wanting to grow, not from beating yourself up until you change.

Breaking the criticism spiral doesn’t mean becoming delusional about your flaws. It means developing enough perspective to see yourself as a whole person rather than just a collection of problems to be fixed.

The Comparison Trap

Nothing kills self-liking faster than constantly measuring yourself against other people. When you’re always looking at what everyone else has, does, or appears to be, your own life starts feeling inadequate by comparison.

Social media has made this worse, obviously, but the tendency existed long before Instagram. We compare our internal experience—complete with all the doubt, boredom, and ordinary struggles—to other people’s external presentations. We compare our rough drafts to everyone else’s highlight reels.

Liking yourself requires developing what I think of as “comparison immunity”—the ability to appreciate what others have without automatically making it mean something negative about what you have. Someone else’s success doesn’t diminish your worth. Someone else’s beauty doesn’t make you ugly. Someone else’s happiness doesn’t mean you’re doing life wrong.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired by others or learn from their examples. It just means you stop using other people’s lives as evidence that your own isn’t good enough.

The Good Enough Revolution

Maybe the most radical thing you can do in our optimization-obsessed culture is decide that you’re good enough as you are right now, while still being open to growth and change.

Good enough doesn’t mean perfect. It doesn’t mean you can’t improve or that you shouldn’t work on things that matter to you. It just means you don’t have to earn your right to exist by constantly becoming better.

You’re good enough to take up space. You’re good enough to have opinions. You’re good enough to make mistakes without it meaning something terrible about your character. You’re good enough to be loved and respected and treated well, not because you’ve achieved some standard of worthiness, but because you’re human.

This is harder than it sounds in a culture that profits from your insecurity. There are entire industries built on convincing you that you’re not good enough yet—not thin enough, successful enough, productive enough, spiritual enough, healed enough.

But what if you just… were enough? What if you stopped trying to fix yourself and started trying to understand and accept yourself? What if you treated yourself with the same basic respect you’d give anyone else?

The Friendship Approach

Instead of trying to fall in love with yourself, what if you tried to become friends with yourself? Think about what makes a good friendship: mutual respect, shared interests, tolerance for each other’s quirks, support during difficult times, and the ability to enjoy each other’s company.

Good friends don’t expect perfection from each other. They don’t keep score of every mistake or constantly point out areas for improvement. They accept each other’s complexity and offer support when things get difficult.

You can apply this same approach to your relationship with yourself. Instead of expecting to feel passionate love for every aspect of who you are, aim for the kind of steady acceptance and support you’d offer a good friend.

This means defending yourself when your inner critic gets too harsh. It means choosing activities and environments that feel nourishing rather than draining. It means speaking to yourself with kindness, especially when you’re struggling.

The Long Game

Learning to like yourself is a long-term project, not a weekend workshop. It requires gradually shifting patterns of thought and behavior that have probably been with you for years. Some days you’ll be better at it than others, and that’s completely normal.

The goal isn’t to reach some permanent state of self-acceptance where you never doubt yourself or feel insecure. The goal is to develop a more balanced relationship with yourself—one where self-criticism doesn’t dominate every other voice in your head.

It’s about becoming someone you can trust to be on your own side, even when you mess up. It’s about developing the internal stability that comes from not depending entirely on external validation for your sense of worth.

Small Steps, Big Changes

You don’t have to revolutionize your entire relationship with yourself overnight. Sometimes liking yourself starts with very small changes: catching yourself when you’re being unnecessarily mean to yourself, choosing clothes that feel comfortable instead of punishing, saying no to things that drain your energy.

It might mean unfollowing social media accounts that make you feel bad about yourself, or spending time on activities that you actually enjoy rather than ones you think you should enjoy. It might mean asking for help when you need it instead of trying to do everything perfectly on your own.

These aren’t dramatic gestures of self-love—they’re basic acts of self-respect. They’re ways of treating yourself like someone whose wellbeing matters, not because you’ve earned it or achieved it, but because you’re here and you deserve to be treated well.

Beyond the Romance

The beautiful thing about liking yourself instead of trying to love yourself is that it’s more sustainable. Love can be conditional, based on how you’re performing or how you’re feeling about yourself on any given day. Liking yourself is steadier—it’s based on acceptance rather than admiration.

You don’t have to think you’re amazing to treat yourself with basic kindness. You don’t have to be your own biggest fan to be your own reliable friend. You don’t have to romance yourself to enjoy your own company.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe learning to be a person you can stand to be around is the real work of self-acceptance. Maybe the goal isn’t to fall in love with yourself, but simply to become someone you like spending time with.

And maybe, if you can do that, everything else—the confidence, the peace, the ability to show up authentically in the world—will follow naturally.