Why imperfect partners make us happy in love

Maintaining healthy expectations in love helps us find love in each other's humanity.

Every day we are bombarded with the idea that, in order to be happy, we must find a relationship that is perfect in every way. These are messages that partly work: as early as adolescence it is normal to fantasize about nothing less than princes and princesses, which for the childish mind is the pinnacle of social and economic success.

When it comes down to it, however, 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 person that in theory we would like to change, but we are also certain that in practice, if we were to alter that, the result would not necessarily be positive. In fact, it may even be that one of the things that makes us happy in love is to have an imperfect partner.Why does this happen?

Reasons why imperfect couples make us happy.

These are some of the aspects that explain why in love happiness can come through our partner's imperfections.

1. Romantic love and perfect lovers

Let's pay attention to our surroundings. Through movies, series, novels and even TV commercials, the main message we want to convey is mixed with a kind of propaganda. is mixed with a kind of propaganda of romantic love..

The ideal partner should be thoughtful but independent, intelligent and responsible, but make us live crazy things, attractive to everyone's eyes, but with a charm that only we find special. It is a marketing-based conception of love: the lover has to fulfill certain "features", like a product, without these being precisely described at any time, as advertising does nowadays.

The idea of idealized love is to put together a bunch of personal traits and characteristics and imagine the supposedly perfect person resulting from this mix. 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 rules that dictate to us what the ideal partner should be like and, many times, we completely betray those preconceived ideas about what it is that we are attracted to in a person.

Although we may not realize it, this is surely the most rebellious aspect of love, the one that breaks our schemes and, consequently, makes the experience stimulatingbecause the story that we will have with that person will have nothing to do with those daydreams of perfect love that we have already gone over a thousand times mentally.

2. A love centered 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 are looking for in a human being. In some particularly delusional versions of this conception of love, that person is predestined to meet us, since both he or she and we are incomplete until the moment the relationship begins; this is the myth of the better half.

That is to say, in romantic love everything that explains romance is attributed to each person, its essence; something that exists beyond time and space, encapsulated within each individual.

However, the love that exists in real lifeoutside of the tales of princes and princesses, is not based on essences, but on what actually happens on a day-to-day basis. It is totally irrelevant that a person is very intelligent if he does not even listen to what we have to tell him, and it is just as irrelevant 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 cause us to lose sight of the fact that the emotional bonds that are truly worth the effort are not only the most important, but also the most important. emotional bonds that are truly worthwhile occur through day-to-day interactions: we are what we are. day-to-day interactions: 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 usually assume that perfection implies total self-sufficiency, and this, applied to love, is negative.

Of course, healthy relationships are those in which there are no asymmetrical power relations or bonds based on dependence on the other, but the opposite of that is a person who simply has no motivation to be with us. And after all, wanting to be with us is not a personal quality in the same sense that knowing how to speak several languages or being fit is, but in love we act as if it were.

According to the Greek philosopher Plato, people are characterized by experiencing beauty and attractiveness from the way we experience perfection, purity. But this perfection we do not find in the physical worldIn the physical world, everything is changeable and imperfect: people are never exactly the same as the ideal of beauty, and at no time do they cease to age, to approach their death.

This is embodied in what we know as Platonic love, a sentimental state in which coexist the intuition that in an ideal world perfection exists and the certainty that we will never have access to it... at least in this world, according to the Greek thinker.

But Platonic love only makes sense if we first take for granted some of the ideas proposed by this philosopher, and one of them is that reality is not matter, but theory, pure ideas. Very few people today deny that reality is composed of matter and not ideas, so the search for pure perfection does not work if we try to apply it in everyday life. That is why, while unrealistic expectations about love unrealistic expectations about love frustrate us, accepting in advance that our partner is imperfect allows us to truly enjoy his or her presence, rather than chasing chimeras.