Nobody’s perfect as a mate, but Mary Poppins was pretty close

By David McElroy · April 14, 2019

About 10 years ago, I almost married Mary Poppins.

She wasn’t an English nanny, but if Mary Poppins had a 21st century American counterpart, this would have been her.

She was brilliant and beautiful. She was full of confidence, but she was charming and diplomatic when she needed to be. She was funny, creative and intellectually curious. And maybe more than anything, she was remarkably competent.

She was the sort of person who you could send to fix any disastrous scene of chaos and failure, because she would organize everything, give orders to those who would take them, charm those who wouldn’t take orders — and bring success where disaster had loomed.

She didn’t care what anybody else thought. She was determined to do only what her conscience told her was right. And she fiercely and protectively loved children.

In almost every respect, she was my ideal woman. And she was crazy about me, too.

She loved the Mary Poppins story and she enjoyed being compared to this magical nanny. At one point, I even gave her a replica of Mary’s parrot-head umbrella.

I’m thinking about Mary Poppins — well, my Mary Poppins — because I’ve been watching “Mary Poppins Returns,” the recent sequel starring Emily Blunt in the role made famous by Julie Andrews. (I liked some things about the movie and didn’t care for others, but I don’t want to get into that.) Watching the movie put me in the mindset of enjoying this character again, so my thoughts inevitably returned to the American Mary Poppins from my past.

Why didn’t I marry someone who was “practically perfect in every way”?

I’ve talked about this before, sometimes pretty directly and sometimes in roundabout ways. But what I’m thinking about tonight isn’t really about the woman I almost married. I’m not kicking myself for not marrying her. I’m not reliving the past and wondering what might have been different. She’s married to someone else and we have gone in entirely different directions. I don’t even know her anymore.

So when I say this isn’t about her, I mean it. This is about what we expect from those people who we choose to be our partners. If this woman met so many of my preferences, why did I back out of marrying her?

We make two seemingly opposite mistakes in relationships, but I don’t really think they’re opposites. I think they’re just flip sides of the same thing. Fear.

One of the mistakes we make is accepting faults that we have no business accepting in a partner. I see this one all the time. People remain with partners who are completely wrong for them — people who have serious flaws that make it impossible for them to be happy together — all because they’re afraid this is the best they’re going to find.

The other mistake we make is asking for perfection. We can become smitten with someone and think this is a perfect match, only to give up or run away when we discover something in the other person which isn’t perfect. We do this because we’re scared that this flaw might be more serious than we fear — and we’re afraid of committing to this “almost perfect” person, because we think someone actually perfect might come along.

I think most people make the the first of these mistakes in their choices of partners, so they end up with partners who are completely wrong for them. They expect too little and they accept partnerships that are serious mismatches.

This leaves them unhappy and lonely.

I have been guilty of the second mistake — and I was guilty of it with my Mary Poppins. The specifics don’t matter now. I had some legitimate concerns, but instead of making sure the concerns were addressed, I gave up out of fear. On a conscious level, I know that nobody’s perfect. Unconsciously, I was probably looking for perfection.

This left me unhappy and alone.

When you make a serious mistake, it’s easy to swing back in the other direction, but I don’t think I’m going to do that. (The one time I came close to doing that, I dated a woman — about three years ago — for a few months simply because she wanted me, but I quickly realized how miserable it made me to date someone who was a horrible mismatch.)

I still fear I might make my old mistake again. I know what I want and need. I’m very specific about it. So what if I meet someone who meets 95 percent of those things? Is that close enough?

I’ve recently come to the end of one long road of waiting and hoping for someone who isn’t going to work out. I’ve given up on her, so I think I’m finally ready to get serious about giving someone else a chance again. I think I’m finally ready to look again without constantly comparing somebody new to the visions of perfection which I’ve carried in my heart.

If I find a Mary Poppins again — and if she loves me — I’m going to marry her, even though she will be flawed. Or she might not be like Mary. She might be more like someone else entirely. But I like to think that I’ve gotten smart enough to know which things are essential and which things I’m willing to work with (or even overlook entirely).

Mary Poppins never claimed to be perfect. The Mary Poppins who I almost married never claimed to be perfect, either. I don’t need to look for someone perfect in the future, because I’m nowhere close to perfect myself.

No matter who she is, the partner I find next will not be perfect, but if I’m lucky, she will be “practically perfect in every way” — at least when it comes to matching me. And that’s more than good enough.

Share on Social Networks

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

Related Posts