Why having imperfect couples makes us happy in love
Day by day we are bombarded with the idea that, to be happy, we must find a perfect relationship in every way. These are messages that partly work: since adolescence it is normal to fantasize about nothing less than princes and princesses, which for the infantile mind is the height of social and economic success.
However, when it comes to the truth 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 also have the certainty that in practice, if we alter that, the result would not have to be positive. In fact, even, maybe one of the things that makes us happy in love is having an imperfect partner . Why does this happen?
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Reasons why imperfect couples make us happy
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
Pay attention to our surroundings. Through movies, series, novels and even television commercials, the main message is mixed it wants to transmit with a kind of propaganda of the romantic .
The ideal couple must be retailer but independent, intelligent and responsible but that makes us live crazy, attractive to the eyes of everyone, but with a charm that only we find special. It is a concept of love based on marketing: the lover has to comply with certain "features", such as a product, without these being accurately described at any time, as advertising does today.
The idea of idealized love is to put together a lot of traits and personal characteristics and imagine the supposed perfect person resulting from this mixture. However, real life does not work like that, and evidently perfect people do not exist either, but that does not mean that when we find a partner we settle for little.
In an intuitive way, we learn to ignore those rules that dictate how the ideal couple should be and, often, we completely betray those preconceived ideas about what attracts us in a person.
Although we do not realize, this is surely the most rebellious aspect of love, which 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 with the perfect love that we have already reviewed a thousand times mentally.
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2. A love centered on the relationship, not on the person
Romantic love is based on the idea that there is a person indicated for us, someone who is the embodiment of everything we look for in a human being. In some especially delirious versions of this conception of love, that person is predestined to know us, since both he and we are incomplete until the moment in which the relationship begins; It is about the myth of the average orange.
That is, in romantic love everything that explains romance is attributed to each of the people, their essence; something that exists beyond time and space, encapsulated inside each individual.
But nevertheless, the love that exists in real life , outside the tales of the princes and princesses, it is not based on the essences, but on what really happens in the day to day. 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 just as attractive if he uses that quality to betray us seducing.
If we all face 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 really worthwhile are given through interactions from day to day: we are what we do, after all.
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3. Vulnerability attracts
If our partner is already perfect, what role do we play in that relationship? Normally we 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 asymmetric power relations or links based on the dependence of the other, but the opposite 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 in which it is to know how to speak in several languages or to be in shape, 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 we can not find this perfection in the physical world , because in it everything is changing and imperfect: people are never exactly the same as the ideal of beauty, and at no time do they stop growing old, approaching their death.
This is reflected in what we know as Platonic love, a sentimental state in which the intuition coexists that in an ideal world there is perfection 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 on a day-to-day basis. That's why, while Unrealistic expectations about love they frustrate us, accepting in advance that our partner is imperfect allows us to really enjoy their presence, instead of dedicating ourselves to chasing chimeras.
