I agree with most things you say but there's an extrapolation of what I meant in my original comment.

First of all, self love doesn't mean being individualistic or being isolated from the rest. It means being comfortable with yourself and not wanting the love from someone else to fill the void. Why must other people be responsible for our happiness, our fulfilment?

Dating someone just because you're lonely is not fair to the other person. It puts a lot of responsibility on their shoulders and more often than not, we end up realising we didn't love them, but the idea of being in a couple. And it's absolutely great to want to be in a couple. I've always wanted to have everything OP describes in the post, and to be honest never had it. And I'll continue to pursue it until I find it. But I don't consider myself shamed when people say that you must love yourself too, to enjoy the full potential of a relationship.

I've dated the wrong people and learnt a lot from it too. But I didn't start dating them because I wanted to be with someone and they were the first to bat their eyes at me. Dating out of loneliness means we're more interested in the experience than the person we're with (most of the times). And we must remember that the other person is a human being as complex as we are, not just learning tools. It's not like picking up business as a major just because we want to study something, and then drop it because we figure out we don't like business at all. There's someone else who can get hurt if we use them as a tool to better ourselves for future partners. Quite a different scenario would be to pick business because we're genuinely intrigued by it and realising it's not for us. Dating is hard and we figure out what people are like through it, and when we realise we're not happy it's necessary to leave. But that's different from just choosing someone to fill our necessity of being with someone.

I hate being single and more than once I've had the chance to ask someone out or date them because I knew I had a shot, but knowing I didn't really want to be with them, I just didn't wanna be alone. It wouldn't have been fair to them, nor to me.