A friend calls me and tells me about a new relationship she is in and she excitedly exclaims that “He is the one!” and “He is perfect for me!” and then proceeds to list all of the positive attributes of this new found love which perfectly melds with her personal attributes.
It is not unusual to participate in this type of dialogue. People are out there finding the perfect person for their selves and falling in love. Are we really finding the perfect person for us? The answer is a big NO! We are not finding the perfect person because the perfect person for us does not exist at least not in the purest definition of “the perfect person”. What happens is what Sam Keen (Philosopher and Spiritual mentor) so eloquently explains in the following quote:“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, buy by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly”
Sam Keen is correct; it is not that we find the perfect person for us rather we learn to see the imperfect person perfectly! Some call this the “rose colored glasses” phase of a relationship where at the beginning we seem unable to see attributes of the other person that we might otherwise regard as faults or traits which do not mesh with who we are and would normally irritate us.
It is often true, when we are in the first phase of “falling in love” we often do put on the blinders and we do disregard some aspects of the other person which could be red flags that in the long term could indicate the relationship could have problems. Often times the quarks that we find adorable in the beginning of a relationship are the very same things that drive us nuts in the latter part of the relationship.
When the relationship shifts from “Isn’t that cute” to “if he does that one more time I swear I am going to mount his head on the wall!” it is time for us to step back and take a look at what has happened. What we will find is that we have shifted from seeing the imperfect person perfectly to simply and only seeing the imperfect person and this is what is often the beginning of the end of a relationship.
I will grant you, once we get to the phase of relationship to where all we see are the imperfections of the other person there are often other factors that are contributing to our perspective. It is important for us to take a deep dive and to examine what is going on because sometimes it is just a matter of our perspective and by shifting our perspective we often find that we can re-learn to see the imperfect person perfectly again. When we re-learn to see the perfection of the imperfection of a person we open the doors to falling in love with that person again.
On a larger scale when we learn to see the perfection of the imperfection of all people we find that it is easier to love and be compassionate with all humanity. On a very intimate scale, when we learn to see the perfection in our own imperfection we learn to love ourselves on a much deeper level and of course when we love ourselves and all of our imperfections we open up the floodgates of love in our life.
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