Falling in love with imperfection
What is it about your partner or your relationship that you find beautiful or interesting and why might that matter?
It matters because how you define what is beautiful or good becomes the qualitative measure of what you experience and how you relate to it. We choose a partner because he/she appeals to that aesthetic sensibility—a composite of character, values, appearance, temperament, interests, sense of humor, sociability, and so on. These are the characteristics that initially set him/her apart from the others.
Then how is it that our partners often end up falling short in our eyes? Did the aesthetic change? Do we appreciate different things at 5, 10, 20 years out?
Possibly. More likely, there is a second metric in play. That is the distance between the real and the ideal, which is actually a measure of our appreciation of, or tolerance for, imperfection. If what our partner is saying or doing doesn’t match our version of how it “should” be, we feel disappointed. We’ve all been there. We’re focused on what’s not there as opposed to what is.
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi could be helpful. This is essentially an aesthetic that describes beauty as fundamentally imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. In the cracked and weathered wooden fence, we can appreciate the sublime art of imperfection—how time and the elements have left their signature marks.
It’s a kind of beauty that can be found in our partners and relationships, if we pause to invite a different way of seeing. This is not a comparison to what was or should be, but rather a closer look at what is, in the present. Your partner may be manifesting love and kindness by filling your car with gas the night before your early meeting; or coming to sit next to you in awkward silence when you ‘re feeling troubled. It’s easy to overlook moments like these, embedded in ongoing life—easy to make them daily and ordinary. Try seeing them instead as authentic and transient moments of beauty that are released from the demands of perfection.
If your only consideration is whether artwork coordinates with the room that you’ve already decorated, appreciation for its full beauty and meaning may be lost. After all, how many of us would want the sculpture of Michaelangelo’s David in our living room? Even he would be deemed imperfect.
I get it. Your partner is not David or Mona Lisa. The kids still need a bath, the bills and trash are piling up and you haven’t been on a date in months. But what if for one moment you might pause and see your partner as the wabi-sabi kind of human artwork that they are at this moment in time?
It just might create an opening wide enough to let some light in.
