Avani Parekh: Creating a Healthy Relationship with Self

There are a thousand good reasons, listed out in over a hundred articles and videos, to cultivate a healthy relationship with self. But maybe the most significant of them is peace of mind. Finding the courage and compassion to value ourselves, and truly practice self-love, is a noble pursuit; it drowns out so much of the unnecessary chatter in our heads coming from our inner critic, constant comparison, lack of confidence et al. When we are grounded in who we honestly are, and we respect and love ourselves, we become better partners, parents, leaders, humans. 

Avani Parekh, Strategic Partner Manager – Community Partnerships at Facebook, has spent the better part of her professional journey understanding relationships and building communities. A serial social entrepreneur, start-up enthusiast and empathy hacker, Parekh founded Lovedoctor.in in 2014 – a confidential platform for people to ask questions about relationships, sex and sexual health. Though now defunct, the website was built to provide a safe space for people to discuss taboo topics, explore questions around creating healthy relationships, and get to know themselves better.

The recurring question on Parekh’s platform of “how do I find a partner/relationship?”, often came from a space of feeling incomplete without a partner. Our media, culture and society makes “love” seem like it’s something to be achieved. That we are somehow not whole/worthy if we don’t have a significant other in our lives. People are longing for something outside of them to fill the loneliness and void that comes from not taking the time to know ourselves better. Before we can hope to have a loving, healthy relationship with someone, we must first build it with ourselves – Parekh tells us how.

It begins with us

The gentle awareness that cultivating a healthy relationship with ourselves is the very first step to creating a healthy relationship with another is the beginning. To recognise that we are whole, worthy and enough before and beyond a significant other. We sure learn and grow with a partner but if we believe that we are incomplete by ourselves, then that’s something to work on before we bring another person into the equation.

Acceptance of self

If we can learn to accept ourselves as we are, with full honesty, we can be at peace. We can stop having to depend on someone externally to prop us up, soothe us, cheer us, love us or even call us out. When we accept that everything in us is there for a reason, we are more compassionate towards ourselves and enter relationships as partners not co-dependents.

Friendship as foundation

Asking ourselves if we would be friends with the person we are in a relationship with is a good measure of gauging the health of the relationship. Would we accept their characteristics if they were in our best friend? Turning this lens on our relationship with ourselves means acknowledging our qualities and flaws, and honestly answering if we’d tolerate them in someone else. This is a great framework to get us thinking if there is something we don’t like about ourselves and how we make peace with it – do we accept it and move on or do we work on it? The significance of friendship is in approaching the process of getting to know ourselves with gentleness, non-judgement and kindness, as we would with a friend.

Celebrating our uniqueness

It could be our personality, a talent, life skill or way of doing things but we all have certain traits that are innately us and we must own and celebrate them. We all have certain gifts and getting to know ourselves in this way is how we come into ourselves and eliminate the need for external validation. Friends and partners who don’t recognise those gifts, discount them or not let them shine are not the right people for us. When we are in a healthy relationship with ourselves we protect, share and amplify these gifts. 

About the expert

Avani Parekh, Strategic Partner Manager – Community Partnerships at Facebook, has spent the better part of her professional journey building and managing communities. A serial social entrepreneur, start-up enthusiast and empathy hacker, her career spans over 16 years and quite a few geographies from New Delhi to Singapore and the US, to list a few. Parekh is driven by empathy and brings that skill to all her interactions and problem-solving.