Just celebrated my 29th wedding anniversary. In retrospect, here is what I've discovered about myself and lasting relationships:

I fell in love and got married and had children, all while not having a very highly level of self-respect and confidence. We made it work, but it was a struggle at times because my negative baggage kept getting in the way. My husband also had his own negative baggage, and the combination kept us from having a truly secure and content and fully satisfying relationship for a very, very long time. We stayed together because our love for each other was strong, but we weren't completely there for each other because of the level of negativity and doubt we had in our own selves (not in each other).

In the last few years, things have greatly improved in our relationship. My husband and I both worked very hard in therapy and in our independent lives to improve our personal outlook and respect for ourselves, and our marriage has finally, after all these years, reached that place of real, comfortable, fulfilling love. It is hard to explain how different things feel now than they did in all of those years where we were each kind of torturing our internal selves with self-loathing and lack of self-respect. It just wasn't secure or even really happy a great deal of the time because we, as individuals, weren't happy with ourselves.

If we were people who did not completely value the sanctity of marriage, who had not been willing to fight HARD to make personal changes and growth, our marriage would have ended decades ago. We wouldn't have made it. I'm glad we had that strong a value for our marriage and family that we committed ourselves to the self-improvement it needed to make it work, but not everyone has that level of commitment to the sanctity of relationship to fight that hard for that long to get where we are. We are blessed that we made it; it is a bit of a miracle that we did. I think many, many relationships don't make it because the individuals within them are not happy within themselves.

So, yes, you can get into a relationship if you don't have a "love" and respect for yourself; getting into a relationship is the easy part really. But maintaining the relationship, growing that relationship, building that relationship is the real challenge, and it will be a rocky road if one or both of the members of that relationship lack self-respect which makes the chances of that kind of relationship lasting as a positive and fulfilling and solid relationship definitely less.