[GiraffeNecktie]

It's important to distinguish two, seemingly contradictory positions:

1 People won't love me for who I am. In fact, it's the job of the rest of the world to show me where I need to improve. But, on the other hand ...

2 I should love people for who they are. It's not my business to make people over. My job is to make myself over. There's more than enough work to be done there. Working on other people's supposed failings is just a distraction from my real business.

That's a rough paraphrase of Byron Katie's "Work", an approach that has helped me tremendously for the last dozen years or so. Whenever I get miserable it's usually a clue that I'm working on someone else's 'business'.

[mtrimpe]

So it's like Postel's principle (be liberal in what you accept no strict in what you emit) for relations?

[GiraffeNecktie]

Yep.