Though the novel’s main focus is Henry and Clare’s love for each other, Henry’s care for himself suggests that self-love is even more precious and vital than one’s love for others. As Henry travels through time, he often meets himself at different stages of life. Because he is both himself in his time-traveling form and the other versions of himself he visits during his time travels, these encounters allow him to give himself direct emotional support. During some visits, he works to teach his younger self skills like pickpocketing, which he will need to survive his travels. When his present self disappears at pivotal moments like his wedding, an alternate version of himself from a different timeline steps in to fill his role. At other times, Henry’s support is more poignant, such as when he offers himself compassion and hope as he grieves Clare’s miscarriages. Perhaps the most important way Henry shows himself love is when he repeatedly returns to the scene of his mother’s (Annette) fatal car crash—the worst day of his life. Each time he returns to that day, he finds new ways to care for his six-year-old self.
Henry’s experiences teach him that as important as his love for wife, daughter, family, and friends remains, he can only ever truly count on himself to fully understand and champion his life across time and space. When he pens the letter Clare will read after he is gone, this truth is the main things he wishes to impart. After expressing his love for Clare and thanking her for guiding him through his chaotic life, he tells her that his keenest wish is for her to love herself well for the rest of her life. Even after he is dead and his love for her lives only in her memories, her love for herself will keep her company for the rest of her days. While this novel primarily explores themes related to romantic love, Henry’s relationship with Clare shows that even the profoundest love with another person has its limits and can’t last forever. After that connection is severed, it leaves whoever remains bereft of the relationship that once sustained them. Henry’s enduring relationship with himself—as well as his parting encouragement to Clare to love herself fiercely—shows that self-love is something one can maintain and draw strength from after all else falls away.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Self-Love ThemeTracker
Self-Love Quotes in The Time Traveler’s Wife
“I’m at the School of the Arts Institute; I’ve been doing sculpture, and I’ve just started to study papermaking.”
“Cool. What’s your work like?”
For the first time, Clare seemed uncomfortable. “It’s kind of…big, and it’s about…birds.” She looks at the table, then takes a sip of tea.
“Birds?”
“Well, really it’s about, um, longing.”
“It’s okay, Henry. I’m your guide, I’m here to show you around. It’s a special tour. Don’t be afraid, Henry […] I brought you a T-shirt, Henry. So you won’t get cold while we look at the exhibits.”
[…] Me at five, dark spiky hair, moon pale with brown almost Slavic eyes, wiry, coltish. At five I am happy, cushioned in normality and the arms of my parents. Everything changed, starting now.
I walk forward slowly, bend toward him, speak softly. “Hello. I’m glad to see you, Henry. Thank you for coming tonight.”
I reach up and pull my hair back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.
“It’s just like mine,” says my self, amazed. “How did you get it?”
“The same as you. It is the same. We are the same.”
A translucent moment. I didn’t understand, and then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once, feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture of future and present for the first time. But I’m too accustomed, too comfortable with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me. The loneliness of it.
“My mother dying…it’s the pivotal thing…everything else goes around and around it…I dream about it, and I also—time travel to it. Over and over. […] if you had enough time to really look at everything, you would see me. I am in cars, behind bushes, on the bridge, in a tree. I have seen it from every angle, and I am even a participant in the aftermath: I call the airport from a nearby gas station to page my father with the message to come immediately to the hospital. I sat in the hospital waiting room and watched my father walk through on his way to find me. […] I walked along the shoulder of the road, waiting for my young self to appear, and I put a blanket around my thin child’s shoulders.”
“Clare, why in the world would you want to marry such a person? Think of the children you would have! Popping into next week and back before breakfast!”
I laugh. “But it will be exciting! Like Mary Poppins, or Peter Pan.”
She squeezes my hand just a little. “Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”
[…] “Do you ever miss him?” she asks me.
“Everyday. Every minute.”
“Every minute,” she says. “Yes. It’s that way, isn’t it?”
The dreams merge, now. In one part of this dream I was swimming in the ocean, I was a mermaid. […] Swimming was life flying, all the fish were birds...There was a boat on the surface of the ocean, and we all swan up to see the boat. It was just a little sailboat, and my mother was on it, all by herself. I swam up to her and she was surprised to see me there, she said Why Clare, I thought you were getting married today, and I suddenly realized, the way you do in dreams, that I couldn’t get married to Henry if I was a mermaid, and I started to cry […].
I am living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense. I’m in a diving bell with this baby […].
[…] I kneel beside the bed and pick him up, my tiny boy, jerking like a small freshly caught fish, drowning in air.
“He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and safe. The boxes are so he can be a bird.”
This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. […] Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don’t leave a note saying where I am. […] Sometimes I get a babysitter and I go to the movies or I ride my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it’s like flying.
I know that you have been waiting for me all your life […] Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus along and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a play-thing of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. […] Love the world and yourself in it. Stop waiting and be free.
[…] when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your hair shining in the sun.
This morning everything is clean; the storm has left branches strewn around the yard, which I will presently go out and pick up: all the beach’s sand has been redistributed and laid down fresh in an even blanket pocked with impressions of rain, and the daylilies bend and glisten in the white seven a.m. light. I sit at the dining room table with a cup of tea, looking at the water, listening. Waiting.
Today is not much different from all other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. […] But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.
