Does the Perfect Partner or Relationship Exist?

I suspect this is more an American problem... in part because I haven't seen it so much outside of America, and in part because America is a nation with people uniquely fixated on "I should get what I want -- all of what I want."

However, there is a certain expectation that a perfect partner and/or relationship should be achievable.

To put that into specific terms:

• It should be possible to find a partner who shares all the same interests as you

• It should be possible to find a partner who wants time together when you want it, and to be alone when you want to be alone

• It should be possible to find a partner with the same love language as you, so you are always happy with her ways of showing affection and she is always happy with yours

• It should be possible to find a partner who always communicates in exactly the way that works best with you, so you always know what the issue is and never encounter drama

• It should be possible to find a partner whose sex drive exactly matches yours, so the sex is never too little, and never too much

• It should be possible to find a partner who's fine to do all the chores that you don't want to do

• It should be possible to find a partner who has all your other requirements, wrapped up into one: your looks requirements, physique requirements, height requirements, intellect requirements, personality requirements, social life requirements. All wrapped up in one

• It should be possible to find a partner who wants exactly what you want from the relationship (more closeness or just a little closeness; one child or two children or ten children or no children; to live a lavish lifestyle, or to live a minimalist one). And that, should you change your preferences at some point, she will change her preferences at the same time, or nearly so, and the two of you won't grow apart

• It should be possible to find a partner who is always pleasing and rarely irritating, and never, ever, ever causes a fuss

The perfect partner, and the perfect relationship.

It should be possible... should it?

Because many relationships end due to what we could ultimately boil down to this one consideration: "She just wasn't perfect enough."

Intense or Boring?

I hear people all the time say things like, "I'm not looking for 'perfect'."

They then state that they just want something where there's never any drama, they always feel happy with their choice of partner, and everything they want with a partner, they get.

In other words, they are looking for perfect.

But they are going to say they "aren't looking for perfect" just to not sound unrealistic.

I, for one, don't think it's a problem to have high aims... so long as you realize they're high.

Many people do not seem to realize these are high-set aims.

These are not ordinary aims. They are extraordinary ones.

It is not normal to have an ideal partner in an ideal relationship. It is very abnormal.

Most relationships are filled with personality conflicts, drama, and intermittent misery. Or, if one of the partners is very compliant, there may not be much drama; instead, such relationships fill with boredom and a sense of duty: "Well we're together because we've been together for so long I'd hate to rock the boat."

You can always tell which kind of relationship someone is in by looking at his behavior:

• Is he alternately frustrated, then excited, by his partner? Sometimes he wants to kick her out, and other times she's the sexiest woman on Earth and the love of his life? Drama-filled (but exciting) hot-and-cold-then-hot-again relationship

• Is he seemingly content with his partner, yet constantly having his mind wander to ways to spice up the sex, sleeping with other partners, and looking for other ways to add more stimulation into his love life? Boring and dutiful yet compliant/contented relationship

"I just want to have a relationship without drama where the girl is the girl of my dreams though," you say.

Only humans don't work that way, due to a phenomenon known as acclimation.

People acclimate to whatever they're used to. When people win the lottery and come into large amounts of money, or they break their spines and become paralyzed from the neck down, within 18 months they have completely acclimated to their situations, and are back to feeling how they felt before they won the lottery or broke their necks:

[Lottery] winners rated the seven ordinary [day-to-day] activities as less pleasurable than controls did, and this difference is significant... Accident victims also tended to find the everyday events less enjoyable than controls, but the difference is not quite significant... [P]araplegic rating of present happiness is still above the midpoint of the scale and the accident victims did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected.

The guy on the left might be elated at first, and the guy on the right devastated... but they will acclimate to their situations and return to how they'd otherwise feel once they've adapted to their new realities.

It works the same in relationships.

Either you have an up-then-down-then-back-up relationship that sometimes annoys the heck out of you, but also prevents you from acclimating... or you have a calm relationship that doesn't cause you too much trouble, but to which you acclimate, grow bored, and then your mind starts to wander.

Likewise, you might think you'd be over-the-moon with that unbelievably hot girlfriend... if you've never had one. But once you get her, once the sheen wears off, her sore points are every bit as annoying to you as your previous less-super-hot girlfriends' were.

She might look like a dream girlfriend now, but when she starts nagging you to death about stuff you don't really care about, you will quickly acclimate to your new paradigm.

The only people this does not seem to happen to are people with very low sex drives -- and in that case, you would need two people with very low sex drives paired up to make that work (only one person having a low sex drive is not going to work).

Now tell me -- which of those (drama-filled-but-passionate, or tranquil-but-boring) sounds more 'perfect' to you?

Neither, right?

You don't have to be at the extreme end of one of those, either. Most relationships will fall somewhere toward the middle.

Yet all relationships (saving those perhaps between two low-drive partners) will alternate between periods of intensity and periods of boredom.

Some will just spend a lot more time in one of those phases than the other.

Perfect Partner Hunters

Accepting that we aren't going to get completely perfect partners, what can we do?

We can look for 'perfect enough' partners -- with the understanding that we will still have problems and deal with flaws and imperfections and either drama or boredom (or both).

Let's leave aside the people who look for completely perfect relationships, and turn our sights to people looking for perfect enough ones. Because there are differences in how people who search for 'perfect enough' do things, too.

We can break people down in their partner searches into two kinds of people looking for two different kinds of 'perfect partners'. They are:

1. The Appearances Junky. The Appearances Junky wants an objectively perfect partner. He is highly focused on what other people approve of, and only wants a partner others will consider "the best." If his partner falls short of that, he can't be happy with her.

2. The Practical Dater. The Practical Dater wants a subjectively perfect partner. He is not too focused on what other people approve of, instead wanting a partner that he himself considers "the best." If his partner is what he wants in isolation, but other people do not approve of her, he isn't really too worried about that.

The Practical Dater is a lot more likely to end up with a nearly perfect partner in a nearly perfect relationship (or as close as you can get to one).

The Appearances Junky will tend to end up with partners who are nearly perfect by external criteria, but whom he is subjectively unhappy with (but feels rewarded every time he shows her off in public), in a relationship that frequently makes them both miserable.

That is because what pleases the general public versus what pleases you yourself is not going to be the same. The general public has a broad range of varied tastes, and if you look at an overall 'preferred archetype' for a partner, you are looking at an amalgam.

For instance:

• The ideal woman is beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, younger by a few years than the men she dates, with a great physique, a plucky attitude, a killer fashion sense, plugged into all the right scenes socially. She hasn't dated a lot, but those guys she has dated have all been rich, muscular men of good social standing, all of whom wanted to marry her (but she felt they just "weren't right" for her).

• The ideal man is a tall, dark, somewhat mysterious man, older by a few years than the women he dates, with a killer sense of humor, which he deploys in a confident, witty way, and not in a silly or goofy way. His body is lean and muscular, without being overly 'roid-ripped, and he is very wealthy, but doesn't flaunt it (too much). He has dated many beautiful women, but always moved on (while staying on good terms with his exes) because "she wasn't the right one for me."

These are what you might call 'social ideals'.

Ideal Woman, meet Ideal Man.

Many people are obsessed with these. If you make yourself as close to these archetypes as you can (i.e., what blonde bombshells are doing when they bleach their hair blonde and make other personality and lifestyle tweaks to conform with this standard), you can be more appealing to the opposite sex... particularly to those members of the opposite sex who are Appearance Junkies.

Going too far into conformance with the stereotype is in fact a bad thing to do if your aim is an ideal relationship... at least, one where you are subjectively happy. But if you really just need to please other people, your own happiness or comfort be damned, then be my guest.

(that's not to say you should not improve your fundamentals. You absolutely should improve your fundamentals! Just note that turning yourself into society's ideal mating archetype for your sex is going to attract a lot of the people who care more about what others think of them than. The closer you get to a social ideal, the more you tend to face attainability issues with people who do not conform with that ideal... many romance novels, such as the famed Fifty Shades of Grey, are about this -- a non-ideal woman falling for an ideal man, but reserved about progressing with him because she feels like the two of them would never match, until at last he proves to her that he really does genuinely desire her)

Within our two categories of Appearance Junkies and Practical Daters, we also have varying levels of realism. For instance:

• An individual who works very hard on his fundamentals, lifestyle, personality, and career, to optimize himself as much as possible, and expects to date an equally optimized partner

• An individual who does not work much on his fundamentals, lifestyle, personality, and career, and would like as close to a perfect partner as possible for him, but isn't unrealistic about what that is (i.e., if he's broke, overweight, poorly dressed, hasn't learned game, and is not charismatic, he's practical about that and aiming for a woman who is within reach for someone of his station)

• An individual who does not work much on his fundamentals, lifestyle, personality, and career, yet desires an objectively perfect partner (i.e., if he's broke, overweight, poorly dressed, hasn't learned game, and is not charismatic, he nevertheless desires a woman far oustide his league... and is not willing to work on himself to get her; he just expects to have her fall into his lap somehow [and to also not immediately get up out of his lap and leave if she should somehow fall into it])

You should be looking for partners who are perfect for you.

Not objectively perfect, according to society's standards. Even if you are the societal 'perfect mate' archetype, that's no guarantee the perfect mate for you will be your opposite sex other archetype (i.e., the bubbly blonde bombshell). You might be a tall, dark, and handsome man who very much likes tall, dark, seductive women. You might prefer bookworm girls to socially connected minglers. If you settle for less than what you want, in order to please society at large, you will have a less-than-ideal relationship.

She's not blonde or bubbly. But who knows, she might be your type.

You should also not look for 'objectively' perfect according to your own standards (rather, you must look for subjectively perfect ones). If you want a partner with a great face, physique, background, and personality, but you've done little work on yourself and are far from being a catch, if you're unrealistic about how great a face, physique, background, and personality you can get, you're going to be searching a long time for a suitable partner, perpetually unable to find one "good enough."

Any time you see someone who's been searching for a suitable partner for ages, you've run into someone who's aiming outside of his current league. I've known several guys with this mentality... and you can see this mentality plastered all over the Internet among women, in all the "Where have all the good men gone?" articles lonely older women post online. Until these individuals either fix whatever it is that repels the people they want to end up with, or they lower their sights to those people who want to be with them, they are going to continue to be frustrated, clueless, and lonely.

If you want the best partner and relationship you can get, you must search for a partner who is subjectively perfect, given your current status.

You can improve what your subjectively perfect woman might be, if you improve yourself enough.

But you must strive to tame any unrealism you have here -- namely, that you can slacken up, just be yourself, yet still demand the very best of the objectively perfect best.

Imperfect Mates in an Imperfect World

The important thing to realize about partners and relationships (as you surely must know) is this: there's no such thing as 'perfect'.

You are going to:

• Have things you dislike in a partner

• Have things you dislike about your relationship

• Feel frustrated to not be able to do [X] thing you want to do as much or as easily once you are in a relationship

• Run into personality conflicts with a partner (you want to do things X way; she wants to do things Y way)

• Experience either drama or boredom (pick your poison), likely alternating between the two unless your relationship is on the extreme end of one or the other

No relationship is free of this.

No matter how optimized you are as a mate, no matter how optimized are your relationship management skills, you cannot escape the imperfect nature of people (yourself included... and your partner) and relationships.

You will never reach perfection.

If that's a tough pill, think of it like this: you are not perfect.

You never will be. Not close to it.

You are never going to be the perfect partner. You will NEVER be able to be or do every single thing a partner could ever want out of you.

You can get good. You can get optimized. But you won't get perfect.

Which means whoever you end up with is going to have to make peace with the fact that you are imperfect. There is always going to be someone who could do a better job at any given facet of a relationship than you can -- always someone who could be more caring when she has a bad day, always someone would could be more attentive or dominant or satisfactory in bed, always someone who could look better for her in public, always someone who could impress her family more, always someone who could afford her a better lifestyle.

However, she is with you, because she's decided that, from the range of different options available to her, you are probably the best.

There's probably a reason she's with you. You ARE the good deal -- for her.

So she's with you.

It's not perfect... but nothing is. She chose you.

And it is going to be the same going the other way: she is never going to be totally perfect for you in every way. There will always be things she could do better, that another woman could be better at than her.

This is just normal. The world is imperfect. Everyone in it is imperfect. Perfection only exists within the mind, or within the heavenly realm -- in the realm of form and ideals.

You can try to get close to perfection. It's a fine goal to aim at.

But you can never do more than strive toward it, and perhaps brush against it.

You can never hold it in your hand and say "I have achieved it; I have reached perfection."

Closer to Perfection

You should of course strive for as optimal a mate and relationship for YOU as you can get.

You should be demanding about it. But you should be realistic about it.

You should also not be so demanding that you are deluded about it.

The league of mate you'll be able to get directly relates to the amount of effort you're willing to put into yourself and your mate-seeking. If you don't want to bother optimizing yourself and you don't want to get good at finding and securing mates, you are going to need to set your sights lower. If you do want to do those things, you are going to be able to set higher sights.

There is a reason why wealthy guys who are only wealthy date relatively unattractive women; why good-looking guys who are only good-looking date women who aren't attractive, or who are but who make them miserable; why guys who learn game but don't improve their fundamentals or lifestyle still only get mediocre-tier girls into relationships. If all you have is part of the package, not the whole package, you are going to end up with girls who are only part of the package, not a whole package.

So, either upgrade yourself enough to get the partners and relationships you want... or lower your sights to match your lowered level of commitment and effort to the mating game.

Those are the choices: put in the effort and reap the reward, or slack off the effort (but also slack off your expectations).

If you're putting the effort in... here's what you should look for in a mate:

• She must make your life better

• She must not be a burden on you (i.e., create more problems than she is worth)

• You must be able to look at her and think "I made the right choice when I chose her!"

• You must be able to take her out in public and at least not feel ashamed (while Appearance Junkies totally revolve around this, and you don't want that, I think it is still healthy for your own mentality to at least be able to feel a little good about how your partner looks for you in public. If she's ugly or a slob it is pretty hard to not care about that, no matter how equanimous you are)

• You must be able to introduce her to family (if you're on good terms with family) and not have problems

• You must be able to introduce her to friends and not have problems

• You must be able to meet one another's needs approximately enough that neither partner has prolonged periods of dissatisfaction (i.e., you are both getting enough sex, enough quality time, enough conversation/bonding, and enough outside events together that both are relatively satisfied most of the time)

• You must both respect one another and hold one another in high esteem

• You must remain attracted to one another, physically and mentally

If you can say all that, you've chosen well.

You've picked a good mate who is a good fit for you and will give you an (overall) good relationship.

It won't be perfect. You are going to argue or get bored. You will sometimes irritate each other, and occasionally hate each others' guts.

But that is how it goes in relationships with other people -- especially close relationships.

It's not going to be perfect. But it can be pretty good.

No two people have perfectly aligned wants, needs, thoughts, priorities, and life objectives. And the more entangled with someone else's life you are, the more conflict these disconnects will cause. You are no more entangled with another person than you are a relationship partner -- so you will tend to have the most conflicts and issues (or, alternately, feelings of boredom and moderate disappointment) with a partner.

Finally, keep in mind (if you're big into social comparison) that most people do not air their dirty laundry. When you see that happy couple posting on social media or making their way through your social circle, and it seems like their relationship is always ideal... well, all that tells you is you don't know them well enough to be hearing about the downsides. Many people are more private about that sort of thing than others.

You can always aim closer to perfection.

But you will never reach perfection itself.

Aim for 'close' (if you're ambitious about that sort of thing), and aim for realistic.

Chase