Flawed Perfect Selves
By Erin Deborah Waks
We don’t get married straight away when we date someone who seems perfect. We don’t make our best friends overnight. We don’t trust people the second we meet them.
It’s always easy at first when you meet a person who feels right. But soon, once you start to lose that rose-tinted, perfect view of each other, it becomes clear that you’re both just humans who are doing their best.
My best friend always used to be late. I, by contrast, am anal about punctuality to an obsessive degree. And for years, we’d fight about it again and again. And then one day, I realised she wasn’t going to change who she was because it didn’t suit me.
So I had a choice: learn to accept and love her for who she is, or find a different best friend. Not because she was ‘wrong’ or ‘bad,’ not because she didn’t love me, but because she couldn’t change for me, shouldn’t change for me. I loved her and she loved me, but we loved ourselves too much to change fundamentally for one another.
That choice was easy.
In accepting her for who she is, and in her wholehearted acceptance of all the messy parts of me, we both got a best friend we wouldn’t replace with anyone else in the whole world, flaws and all.
Once you love someone, I guess it stops being about ‘are they good enough,’ or ‘do they even care about me,’ and it starts being a lot more nuanced. The question becomes, ‘can they be what I need?’ and ‘am I capable of accepting them the way they are?’
The first step is owning who you are. Being unapologetically you. And I’m the first to admit I’ll behave the way I think someone else wants, the way I think they need. But I’m learning to be an imperfectly perfect version of me, not of who others want me to be. And I think, through that, it’s easier to determine who you’ll let into your world, the people who don’t taint but enhance it.
So that’s why you can’t know overnight; you need to show all your cards first. You don’t get a vision into the future to know if someone is temporary or permanent. You meet all the people you’re supposed to meet and try to figure out which ones whose flawed perfect selves are made for your flawed perfect self.
Some of us worry we’re too much; others that we’re not enough. We all want to feel like we’re just right to someone. And we’re all just doing our best in the pursuit of that.
