Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy’s line doesn’t romanticize love; it interrogates the conditions under which love can even take root. “Love as if you liked yourself” reads like a dare aimed at anyone trained to treat self-contempt as realism. The trick is in the “as if”: she’s not demanding you achieve perfect self-esteem before you’re allowed intimacy. She’s proposing a practice, a posture you can adopt before you fully believe it, the way you might speak a new language fluently only after you stop apologizing for your accent.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Piercy’s work emerges from feminist and left literary traditions that insist private life is shaped by public forces: gendered expectations, labor, bodily policing, the constant marketing of inadequacy. In that world, self-liking isn’t a soft luxury; it’s a refusal to participate in your own diminishment. Loving “as if” you liked yourself becomes a strategy for breaking the loop where you accept crumbs because you’ve been taught you deserve them.

“And it may happen” is the quiet blade. No guarantees, no manifest-your-destiny cheerleading. She offers a conditional hope grounded in behavioral truth: when you treat yourself as someone worth caring for, you raise your standards, clarify your boundaries, and become less available to people who feed on insecurity. The sentence is short because it’s meant to be usable - a compact counterspell to the idea that love arrives first and self-respect follows. Piercy flips it, unsentimentally.