People have inherent worth. What do you think t need to do, or be, or accomplish to be worthy of love? Because I will tell you almost none of it is necessary beyond being a good partner. My wife, in some ways is a better person than I could ever be — and in some ways not.
If you communicate, compromise and are attentive, industrious, and honest I would hazard a guess that you will find someone eventually because just those qualities make someone a good partner — if you can do that, someone out there is looking for someone like you right now, because they’ve been burned by people without those traits.
Then the real trick is to find someone who is worthy of you in return. They should be the kind of person who wants to be part of your dreams and goals, and you should want to be part of theirs. And they should have the qualities of a good partner as well.
I couldn’t call either a favorite, but there are two that have stuck with me my whole life. Edit to fix formatting.
The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It feels as relevant to our time as it was for WW1.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.