M Scott Peck defines love thus:

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

In that context, you might well be able to love another. However, you will most likely punish, hurt or resent them at the same time. Such is the contradiction of life.

Everything comes from within you, your entire experience of life is from inside yourself. If you don’t love yourself, then you’re not going to be able to give consistent, caring, nurturing, unconditional love.

You don’t need to be perfect, in fact, you don’t need to be anything at all. It’s the process of trying to control everything which is where the pain arises. Perfection is an illusion, just forget about it, it’s a diversion that feelings create to stop you from experiencing them. Anyone who says they are a perfectionist is hiding something.

True joy in life comes from not being perfect and simply allowing the world to appear naturally, as it should.