If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! by Whoopi Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

people stopped trying to live the dream of a movie or a TV show, stopped allowing pop culture to tell them what makes them worthy or gives them value, they would be a lot happier. Figure that stuff out on your own. When you do, you will be a more authentic you, and that will reflect how solid you are in your sense of self and in how you react to and behave with other people.
    They say that you have to love yourself first before you can love somebody else. It’s true. I have to love me, I have to have high self-esteem before I love somebody else. It’s really simple.
    If you don’t love yourself, and you’re loving somebody else, you’re putting all the responsibility for yourself on him, which is not fair. Everybody has to come in 100 percent. I’m here 100 percent. You’re here 100 percent. We will work through whatever we find. But if you’re coming in as basically half a person, any relationship is not going to work. Nobody should be in charge of babysitting you, or vice versa. Once you are a grown-up, you no longer need a babysitter, and you should not be babysitting your friends or your lovers. You should both be self-sufficient people who know themselves and who can share that with each other. That is called maturity.
    One of my favorite books is Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
. In it, he talks about the importance of two people in a relationship remaining separate individuals and being whole people before they get into anything. Here’s a quote from the book that captures some of it:
    [A] good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility… [O]nce the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
    Again, the best kind of relationship is one where two whole people come together and support one another. Rilke does not say the best kind of relationship is one where you are going to try to fix the other person and mold him into what you think you want.
    He has a lot of other interesting things to say, so when you’re done with this book, go out and get his. He said it a hundred years before I did.
    How, you may ask, do you know if the person you are involved with is coming into the relationship as half a person? You will know when the person you’re with is not quiet—he (or she!) acts like a baby or is very needy, “Give me, give me, give me.” When it’s all about him (or her). Why is he so needy? He hasn’t yet learned how to fulfill himself, his own needs. This takes self-awareness and maturity.
    But, again, the specter of being alone pops up, and we go, “No, no, no. I can work it out. I can teach him. I can make him better.”
    I am here to tell you that you can’t. You can’t fix someone else. You’ve got to be honest and say, “No, I understand. You need a lot of stuff.”
    And I ask you, why would you
want
to “fix” another person anyway?
    Why would you want to fix your lover, your friend?
    And why would you want to marry someone and attach yourself to him if he needs to be fixed?
    The only reason is because you need to feel like a hero, you need to feel needed, and if that’s the case, you aren’t a complete person.
    This is what gets us all into trouble.
    Think about it. You have all sorts of other things going on in your life, and now you have to take care of this other person who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. It is a lot of pressure, and while it may be some sort of ego boost in the short run, in the long run it is going to drain you and take away whatever attraction or respect you had for him.
    You need to realize that this is not the person for you, because instead