Having imperfect partners 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. They are messages that partly work: from adolescence it is normal to fantasize no less than princes and princesses, which for the child mind is the pinnacle of social and economic success.

However, at the moment of 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, it may even one of the things that makes us happy in love is having an imperfect partner. Why is this happening?

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Reasons why imperfect partners 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

Let's pay attention to our surroundings. Through movies, series, novels and even television commercials, the main message that wants to be transmitted with a kind of propaganda of the romantic.

The ideal couple must be thoughtful but independent, intelligent and responsible but that makes us live crazy, attractive in the eyes of everyone, but with a charm that only we find special. It is a conception of love based on marketing: the lover has to fulfill certain "features", as a product, without these being accurately described at any time, as advertised today in day.

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 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 what the ideal partner should be like and, Many times, we completely betray those preconceptions about what it is that attracts us in a person.

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

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2. A love focused on the relationship, not 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 seek in a human being. In some especially delusional versions of this conception of love, that person is predestined to know each other, since both she and we are incomplete until the moment in which the relationship; it is about the myth of the better half.

In other words, in romantic love, everything that explains romance is attributed to each person, their essence; something that exists beyond time and space, encapsulated within each individual.

However, the love that exists in real life, outside of the tales of princes and princesses, it is not based on essences, but on what really 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 say, and it is the same that she is attractive if she uses that quality to betray us by seducing.

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 really worth it occur 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 take it for granted that perfection implies total self-reliance, and this, applied to love, is negative.

Of course, healthy relationships are those in which there are no asymmetric 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 U.S. And after all, wanting to be with us is not a personal quality in the same sense in the which is knowing how to speak in several languages ​​or be fit, but in love we act as if was.

According to the Greek philosopher Plato, people are characterized by experiencing beauty and attractiveness from the way in which we experience perfection, purity. But this perfection is not found in the physical world, since in him everything is changeable 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 coexists that in a world ideal perfection exists and the certainty that we will never have access to it... at least in this world, according to the thinker Greek.

But platonic love only makes sense if first we take for granted 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 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 is 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 pursuing chimeras.