Why Waiting on the Perfect Partner Is Idiotic

Sweet Ambrosia!! A gift from the gods: and if you don't have faith (this is a secular male that's posting) the mathematical impossibility that is life is the key to understanding why waiting on the perfect partner is idiotic!!! I've had tons of women come to me; I've had tons of men come to me saying, "I can't wait until I find the perfect partner." However, in a world where divorce rate for first time marriages is 50%(in America), it seems more and more people remain optimistic about finding the perfect partner. Let's examine this phenomenon.

Unfortunately for us, Hollywood has bastardized the image of love. Music, television shows, and periodicals don't show me what a real human is; they show me the equivalent of riding off into the sunset and living happily ever after. Think about the ending of Why Did I Get Married?; the character Shelia's problems are solved by marrying some other guy when that's probably the last thing she needed. She finds the perfect man, with no problems, that's completely subsumed with helping her. This is the equivalent of a knight in shining armor saving the princess in the tower from the dragon. Not only does this distort my image of love, it gives me a standard to judge my romantic relationship: an impossible standard.

Secondly, because of these distorted images we've lost sense of what true "love" really is. What we've gotten in return is a co-dependency many people think is healthy. "She's my everything," "I can't breathe without him," "Without you life is dull" - these aren't romantic sentiments!!!!! They tell me we've lost a sense of ourselves and substituted it for an unhealthy addiction. It's funny how detrimental both crack addiction and love addiction can be.....and how annoying.

Third, we've become a culture that's fallen in love with the idea of being in love. Too many conversations are now focused on "What age do you want to get married." Not "Should I get married?" or "Is marriage right for me?" or "Why should I get married?" Most people want to be in "love" so badly, they fall in "love" with the wrong people. We imagine a perfect partner that doesn't exist; we strangle and put too much emphasis on the other person once we've found a "suitable" partner. Our beliefs evolve from childhood. Why is it we hold on to the notion of happily ever after?

As stated earlier, the key to getting over the fantasy of finding the proverbial prince or princess is in the beauty and statistical improbability that is life. According to famed scientist Stephen Hawking, "one of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist." I won't get into why this is true, but the universe being imperfectly arranged allows gravity to do its thing, without gravity there would be no life. It applies to relationships as well. Nothing is perfect, but from these imperfections we find great human beings we want to share our life experience with. The trick is making sure your imperfections and their imperfections don't clash. If you can find that, then you've found a partner. I'm not saying attraction is not important. I'm saying the beauty in relationships is not perfection in the other partner: it's sharing a life experience with them. Learning, growing, loving, arguing, and laughing with each other. When we look for that "perfect partner" we might as well be looking for a Barbie or Ken doll: a plastic cutout.

Perfection is boring and doesn't exist. Like the philosopher Smokey Robinson put it, I only want somebody "cruisin' my way." If you're lucky enough to find a real-life human being with real-life issues, embrace them!!!! Love is a battleground, not a walk in the park. You don't want to die without any scars...so stop trying to avoid them. Get in the ring and box it out (not literally). A relationship built on independence and trust that's tested through adversity is stronger than a relationship with no problems at all. Happily-ever-afters aren't carriage rides in the sunset; they're smoldering battlefields after a long war.

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