Why Having Imperfect Partners Makes Us Happy In Love
Every day we are bombarded with the idea that, to be happy, we must find a relationship that is perfect in every way. They are messages that partly work: from adolescence it is normal to fantasize about nothing less than princes and princesses, which for the child’s mind is the pinnacle of social and economic success.
However, when push comes to shove it is perfectly normal to be happy with people who are not exactly the model boyfriend or girlfriend. We notice that there is something in the other that in theory we would like to change, but we are also certain that in practice, if we altered that, the result would not have to be positive. In fact, it may even be one of the things that makes us happy in love is having an imperfect partner Why is this happening?
These are some of the aspects that explain why in love happiness can come through the imperfections of our partner.
1. Romantic love and perfect lovers
Let’s pay attention to our surroundings. Through movies, series, novels and even television advertisements, the main message that they want to transmit it with a kind of romantic propaganda
The ideal partner must be thoughtful but independent, intelligent and responsible but who makes us experience crazy things, attractive in everyone’s eyes, but with a charm that only we find special. It is a conception of love based on marketing: the lover has to meet certain “features”, like a product, without these being described precisely at any time, just as advertising does today.
The idea of idealized love is to bring together a lot of personal traits and characteristics and imagine the supposed perfect person resulting from this mixture. However, real life doesn’t work like that, and obviously perfect people don’t exist either, but that doesn’t exactly mean that when it comes to finding a partner we settle for little.
Intuitively, we learn to ignore those norms that dictate what the ideal partner should be like and, many times, we completely betray those preconceived ideas about what attracts us in a person.
Although we may not realize it, this is surely the most rebellious aspect of love, what breaks our schemes and, consequently, makes the experience stimulating because the story we will have with that person will have nothing to do with those daydreams about perfect love that we have already reviewed a thousand times in our minds.
2. A love focused on the relationship, not on the person
Romantic love is based on the idea that there is a person who is right for us, someone who is the embodiment of everything we look for in a human being. In some especially delusional versions of this conception of love, that person is predestined to know us, since both she and we are incomplete until the moment the relationship begins; It is the myth of the better half.
That is to say, in romantic love everything that explains romance is attributed to each of the people, their essence; something that exists beyond time and space, encapsulated within each individual.
However, the love that exists in real life, outside of the stories of princes and princesses, is not based on essences, but on what really happens on a daily basis. It is totally irrelevant that a person is very intelligent if he does not even listen to what we have to say, and it is equally important that he is attractive if he uses that quality to betray us by seducing us.
If we all approached relationships as romantic love dictates, our obsession with the imperfections of potential partners would make us lose sight of the fact that The emotional bonds that are truly worthwhile come through interactions day to day: we are what we do, after all.
3. Vulnerability attracts
If our partner is already perfect, what role do we play in that relationship? We normally assume that perfection implies complete self-sufficiency, and this, when applied to love, is negative.
Of course, healthy relationships are those in which there are no asymmetrical power relationships or ties based on dependence on the other, but the opposite of that is a person who simply has no motivation to be with us. And at the end of the day, wanting to be with us is not a personal quality in the same sense that knowing how to speak several languages or being in shape is, but in love we act as if it were.
According to the Greek philosopher Plato, people are characterized by experiencing beauty and attractiveness based on the way in which we experience perfection, purity. But We do not find this perfection in the physical world since everything in it is changing and imperfect: people are never exactly the same as the ideal of beauty, and at no time do they stop aging, approaching their death.
This is reflected in what we know as platonic love, a sentimental state in which the intuition that in an ideal world perfection exists and the certainty that we will never have access to it coexist… at least in this world, according to the Greek thinker.
But Platonic love only makes sense if we first accept some of the ideas that this philosopher proposed, and one of them is that reality is not matter, but theory, pure ideas. Very few people today deny that reality is made up of matter and not ideas, so the search for pure perfection does not work if we try to apply it on a daily basis. That is why, while unrealistic expectations about love frustrate us, accepting in advance that our partner is imperfect allows us to truly enjoy their presence, instead of dedicating ourselves to chasing chimeras.
