It’s always easy for us to practice self-love when we’re single. It’s easy to preach about loving yourself and putting yourself first and it’s easy to tell our friends to walk away when they’re not being treated right or with the respect they deserve.

But it’s always when it’s our turn, when we’re on the other end, that we realize that it’s easier said than done and we start doing things we’re totally against, we don’t practice what we preach anymore and we suddenly start to lower our standards and eventually forget about our self-worth, forget what we deserve and we begin to settle.

We start accepting less, we start being okay with late responses and being ignored, we start giving lame excuses because we finally found someone who moved us, we finally found someone who made us smile and someone who made us look forward to tomorrow. So we keep prolonging the pain, the confusion, the self-doubt for as long as we can hoping that they’ll change or they’ll come around or they’ll start treating us the way we treat them once they know that we really value them.

We stop asking the important questions, like if they’re dating someone else, we stop telling them what we’re okay and not okay with because we don’t want to push them away, we stop telling them how we really feel because we don’t want them to think we’re too needy or too emotional. We stop being ourselves and become who we think they would like.

We ignore the red flags because we think we can handle them, we think we can live with a few unanswered texts or flaky behavior or a few months of confusion but we can’t. Because every day it gets worse and every night your thoughts drain you. It doesn’t feel right. Sometimes it feels one-sided, sometimes it feels too casual and sometimes it feels like nothing. There’s no effort, there’s no communication — all you have are bits and pieces of attraction, social media games and a bunch of mixed signals.

We’re all guilty of doing this; forgetting who we are because we’re really into someone, we let them get away with the things we frown upon, we forgive them when they weren’t even sorry, we give them so many things they didn’t even earn. But eventually, we realize that we deserve more, that we can’t keep playing this game and we start to slowly remember our self-worth, how we truly want to be loved and eventually, we leave.

Eventually, we learn how to walk away from the people who don’t make us feel worthy and we find the courage and the strength to start over. We focus on ourselves again and have faith that someone better is coming along. Someone who doesn’t make us feel like we’re settling or selling ourselves short.

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.