Every day since our childhoods, we’ve been picking up messaging and cues which have contributed to shaping our perception of The Ideal Man. Whether you based it off your father or another male figure that was very active in your life, what your mother told you was the ‘right guy’, or from movies, books, other media and interaction with the opposite sex, it is unavoidable that you have ended up building up beliefs and predetermined ideas about what a relationship and the man you have it with should ideally be like. The trouble is, isn’t there a point when we need to switch from fantasy to reality?

There is no such thing as a perfect man, that’s for damn sure, but as sure as the sun will rise and set tomorrow, I also know that we’re not in danger of coming across the perfect woman either. Perfection implies flawless and the very nature of being a human being with emotions that sometimes gets it right and at other times makes it wrong, means that it is impossible for a perfect specimen to exist. Even if you did meet someone that appeared to be perfect, you’d either spend a lot of your time wondering what the frigging catch was, or be incredibly disappointed when they acted ‘human’ or God forbid, screwed up.

If we keep on assuming that there is someone perfect to slot into our lives we’re setting ourselves up for a life of disappointment. This is no more likely to happen than we are to come across a ‘soulmate’ that thinks and acts exactly like we do, all of the time. Life throws curve balls which means that when our partner has an hour, day, week, month where he doesn’t think and act as we’d prefer, our false and exaggerated expectations will make us feel emotionally wounded and let down.

The very idea of a man expecting us to be perfect twenty four seven will make most women shudder and stamp their feet at their egotistical desire for perfection and it’s no different when we’re the ones that demand it. Whether you’ve got a master list of criteria in your head or are subconsciously chasing your dream vision of a man, you’re actually narrowing your field of vision, reducing the pool to fish from and setting yourself up for a fall from the giddy heights of great expectation. You’re effectively chasing something that doesn’t and will never exist.

The trouble with great expectations about the perfection of your partner is that you aren’t making allowances for the fact that they can and they will screw up. When you’re clocking up a list of characteristics of The Ideal Man, you don’t think tall, dark, handsome, trustworthy, loving, caring, religious, shares the same aspirations and ambitions, strong values, wants to get married and have babies, leaves skidmarks in his pants, can’t tidy up to save his life, belches or farts without saying pardon, forgets anniversaries, sometimes doesn’t express what he feels and means very well, tries to fix instead of listening etc’. THAT is real life!

Until it becomes common day practice to buy a robot that can be and do all that you want, perfection will remain elusive and even if it came in the form of a robot, I’m sure that it would be subject to technical faults and loss of battery life. Yes, perfection really doesn’t exist for the task of relationships.

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