Why Putting Yourself First Isn’t Selfish—It’s the Ultimate Cosmic Survival Hack You Didn’t Know You Needed
Added on November 15, 2025 inASTROLOGY CARDS
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Ever catch yourself giving and giving in a relationship, only to wonder why the whole thing feels like a leaky boat you’re frantically bailing water from? Yeah, me too. Turns out, the dirty word “selfish” might just be our secret weapon for happiness—who knew? Today’s celestial lineup has Mercury doing its little cosmic shuffle, nudging us to rethink how we “serve” others. So, what if putting yourself first isn’t just okay, but downright essential? I wrestled with this myself—once upon a time, I convinced myself that being all selfless was romance’s golden rule. Spoiler alert: it’s not. Prioritizing you isn’t self-indulgent—it’s survival, a tough but necessary love letter to your sanity. Ready to stop twisting yourself into a human pretzel just to keep someone else happy? Let’s dive in and unpack why being a little “selfish” might just save your relationships—and your soul. LEARN MORE.
Being selfish has a bad reputation, but if you want to know how to be happy in life, it’s time for you to learn the benefits of selfishness. Most of the time, you’re giving too much to a relationship and wondering why it’s not working.
As simple an idea as it is to put yourself first, I noticed my own personal resistance to actually doing it. I’ve bent over backward when the person I was with didn’t even ask for that, let alone want it. I’ve always used rationalizations like “Romance is being selfless toward someone else” or “If he’s happy, you’ll be happy” as I’ve made the choice countless times to put myself second, and it feels terrible.
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Any relationship should only make up 25 percent of your happiness, at most. Getting into the habit of changing to make other people happy only reinforces the mistaken idea that their source of happiness is external and teaches them to rely on you to make changes to suit them. Research on people pleasing showed how this behavior can negatively impact mental health.
Making changes to suit someone else because you want to is one thing. But, going against what you really want and changing to make someone else happy becomes terribly problematic. You can rip yourself apart in this way, and when it’s all over, they won’t respect you more or want to be with you more.
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You’re better off handing that personal responsibility right back to them, even though it might seem hard or you might feel like you’re risking their disapproval. They’ll either accept your boundaries or they’ll leave you. Either way, if you settle for changing for them, you’ll eventually twist yourself into a pretzel, and neither of you will really end up any happier.
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No one wants to be called selfish. It takes us right back to being told to share when we were five years old. And, as adults, we should go into relationships to give.
However, you can’t give someone what you don’t have yourself. If you aren’t caring for yourself first, you can’t care for anyone else. It’s a little bit like the warning on airplanes to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others.
If you let yourself die, you’re not going to be much help to anyone else. You’re actually making it possible to help others by putting yourself first. Happy people are selfish, but in a healthy way.
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“Rumination and reflection are mediators between forgiveness and health,” showed a study investigating resentment. When you put yourself first, you remove the self-righteous tendency to become angry and resentful when you give too much or change to please someone else. I think of “resentment-proofing” your relationship. If you give someone more than you’re willing to give for an extended period of time, you’re selling yourself out, and you’re bound to deal with your negative feelings sooner or later. “
Putting themselves second is how people end up bottling everything up and then exploding later, saying that someone else didn’t appreciate them. It shows they were giving or changing to get their partner’s approval, and when their partner didn’t provide approval in exactly the way they wanted, kaboom! If they had chosen only to give what they felt good about giving, then they wouldn’t have this dormant, pent-up anger-reservoir volcano just waiting to explode.
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When you don’t honor your needs first, you run the risk of letting someone else walk all over you. Selling yourself out risks both your respect for yourself, and this is a slippery slope. People don’t get treated terribly when they have firm, healthy boundaries and consistently honor their own needs.
They get treated terribly when they gloss over what they really want and allow the other person to take advantage of them in little bits over time. By the end of the relationship, they’re bent over backward, and they don’t realize how it happened. Unfortunately, it happened because they allowed it to happen gradually.
Research from Harvard Health advised, “Mindful attention to emotions involves not judging, but observing your emotions when they arise. This can lower your brain’s emotional response to anxiety and distress. It effectively calms down your amygdala.”
Recently, I got some coaching from a very insightful, intelligent coach who has been working with people for 60 years. It was a life-changing experience. One of the most deceptively simple, yet profound things he told me was to never, ever make anyone else number one.
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“That spot should always be reserved for you,” he said. He went on to say that people go around mistakenly thinking that they should put their partner first, but this leads to heartbreak and terrible relationships for several reasons.
The session was quickly over, and I was left thinking about it for days afterward. As I got to thinking about it, I realized that when we have relationship questions, the answer is rarely that you aren’t giving enough, even though you often suspect that.
So, if you see yourself in this, let’s make the decision together to make ourselves number one so we can have the healthy relationships we deserve.
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I’m working on it, and I know you will too.
Elizabeth Stone is a love coach and the founder of Attract The One and Luxe Self. Her work has been featured in Zoosk, PopSugar, The Good Men Project, Bustle, Ravishly, SheKnows, Mind’s Journal, and more.
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