If we keep waiting for perfection, we’ll always keep traveling alone

By David McElroy · November 21, 2021

All my life, I’ve been in search of the ideal. Perfect people. Flawless performances. And a perfect romantic partner.

I wouldn’t have admitted this for a long time, mostly because I didn’t realize it. I told myself I had high standards — for myself and others — but I didn’t understand for years how much I was communicating my disapproval to others. I didn’t realize that I was silently telling others, “You’re not good enough for me.”

I had a long conversation late Saturday night with a woman who I used to spend a lot of time with. We were friends, but we never had a romantic relationship. When something came up about the fact we had never dated, she told me something surprising.

“I didn’t think I would ever be what you wanted in a woman,” she said. “You told me all the things you were looking for — and I didn’t think I’d ever be good enough for your standards.”

Was she right? Have I been focused on an unattainable ideal? Someone who doesn’t exist? Am I alone because I wouldn’t accept “almost perfect” when I had the chance?

She told me things I had told her I wanted — things she didn’t think she could ever meet. Some of them were physical standards. She was afraid she wasn’t tall enough for me since she’s “only” 5-foot-9. She knew that my ideal woman would have blue eyes and she has hazel eyes. She didn’t think I would find her attractive enough.

And there were other things.

“You just always seemed to want someone who would be so completely put together and perfect,” she said, “and I didn’t think you would ever see me as good enough.”

Earlier Saturday, another female friend — someone I’ve known for only about five or six years — was sharing some details about her past that I never knew. She shared about sexual abuse that happened when she was a child. She talked about different sorts of abuse she had suffered as a teen. And she talked about being homeless for awhile in her early 20s before I knew her.

If you met her today, you wouldn’t suspect any of that. She’s a professional with a graduate degree who lives in a nice home. She’s stunningly beautiful. She’s very intelligent and she’s charming when she wants to be. She appears to have everything together.

But she has dark feelings and dark fears. She admitted today that she has horrible thoughts about herself. She feels defective and broken. She has trouble keeping close friendships. She implied that she feels so isolated that she’s thought about suicide, even though she wouldn’t directly admit that.

Listening to her affected me deeply.

This is a young woman who would be a very attractive romantic partner for most men. She could have almost anybody she wanted. She wouldn’t be a good match for me, simply because our values are too different. But for men with values that align better with the culture around us, she would be an amazing catch.

All of that is true. Everything seems perfect on the outside. But would her hidden dark side make her “not good enough” or at least too complicated for most men? Probably. Would I have pushed away someone who had such issues at one time. Definitely. (Of course, the irony is that I was in denial about my own hidden dark side at the time.)

After what she shared today, I found myself thinking — not for the first time — that we have insane judgment about who to choose and who to reject. And I found myself thinking that anybody who wants the great things that come with this woman — which is most of her — needs to be willing to accept and deal with the hidden dark side, too.

I rejected a woman about 12 years ago because I saw evidence that she had emotional issues that scared me. (I’ve talked about this multiple times, most recently last week.) I like to think I’m wiser than that now, but I know I’ve walked away from “not perfect enough” more than once.

I hope I’ve learned that lesson.

The friend with whom I talked Saturday night did have values that aligned with mine. She would have been a really good match for me back then. But she wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. She wasn’t perfect. And so I let her know — in a way that probably wasn’t subtle — that she wasn’t “good enough” for me.

I’m not arguing for throwing standards out the window. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t insist on a partner who meets our important standards, especially when it comes to shared values and shared expectations about what a family should be.

I’m just saying that the things we often treat as being of paramount importance — looks, money, social acceptance — are relatively unimportant compared to the things that do matter. Shared values, emotional connection, real intimacy and more.

If the people around you think you have a great match — because you’re both successful and attractive and socially acceptable — but you don’t have the connections that matter, you’re going to be miserable. In fact, if you’re paired with someone like that, being with that person will be worse than being alone.

But if you have love and connection and understanding — and shared values and true intimacy — when nobody’s around, the other things ultimately don’t matter.

If you’re blind enough and short-sighted enough to expect everything from someone, you might reject the right partner for the wrong reasons.

And you might just end up alone and unhappy while you wait for perfection. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a terrible mistake to make.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts