On Choosing a Partner
In my teenage years—in tandem with all the other naïve and absurd thoughts that used to inhabit this mind—I approached every potential relationship believing that it could work irrespective of the circumstances. Likely merely a subconscious response to ameliorate myself from the persistent sting of loneliness, I blinded myself to the glaringly obvious unanswered questions: Have I spent enough time with this person to truly know anything about them? Do I truly know if they feel anything for me in the first place? Have I devoted any time to think about what I actually intend to do with this relationship? Over time, as I became disillusioned by the harsh reality of human nature, whether preemptively realizing the incompatibility or thwarted by the sting of rejection, I became cognizant of this blatant ignorance. I subsequently conformed to the conventional perspective of determining a romantic partner—concocting absurd requirements and exactifying the specific traits that one should possess, conceptualizing abstracted caricatures of others through ideal types, drawing countless arbitrary boundaries and assigning red flags to any undesirable action, and obsessing over the circumstances that precede any form of relationship.
It was only until recently that I questioned these meticulous standards and arbitrary requirements: why should I pretend that I understand this volatile and capricious heart? Why should I act as if I knew with any degree of certainty if a relationship would truly work or not? As if I understood human chemistry, as if I comprehended the intricacies of each interaction? As if I knew precisely the emotional reactions that would ensue? As if I could predict the future—the aggregate outcome of each and every event that would befall us? Why persist in this façade, going against every principle and lesson that I’ve ever internalized in my life? Why make an exception for our natural inclination to believe certain things—our unreliable intuition and our haughty sense of judgment—when time and time again it has proven itself excessively prejudiced and wholly presumptuous? Why do we pretend to know, when, constantly deceived by our emotions and our myopic worldview, we know virtually nothing?
Knowing what I know now about human nature and the human condition, could I be so oblivious to blithely approach any human interaction, romantic or platonic, expecting the other person to be perfect in any conceivable way? To have neither flaw nor fault in character? To have neither scar nor blemish? To have neither trauma nor vice? Insofar as we want a relationship to reflect the same values as we would life is general, the solution is neither to remain oblivious to another’s flaws, nor is it to manufacture absurd standards believing that doing otherwise is settling for less. In the same way that suffering is an indispensable component of a fulfilling life, imperfection is an indispensable component of a fulfilling relationship. It is what gives it color and shape, a mission and a meaning, a story and a purpose.
To give someone the benefit of the doubt—to eschew our spurious preconceptions of relational compatibility, to lay bare the ignorance and whimsicality that resides in our hearts, to be tolerant, sensitive, and empathetic towards another’s deficiencies—is to let our stories pan out beyond the first chapter.
