Saturday 23 February 2013

The hardest question, the simplest answer

Someone asked me today, "How you know if someone is right for you?"

It's an interesting question. "I guess you just have a gut instinct, you just know," I answered.  And as I tend to, I have spent some time pondering if that was the right answer.

Thinking back to my marriage choice, I knew he was not the right man for me. But I wanted him to be, so I set about ignoring the large flags a flying, wilfully disregarding the facts in favour of only seeing what I wanted to see.

And that is what we do. We enter relationships with people who have something about them that we genuinely like and we will it to work. Since we want it to work so badly - we fail to look at it in the cold light of day and ask whether this person is right in all the places they needs to be right. And they often aren't.

It is true that there is no such thing as the perfect person. No one is without fault. No woman, no matter how beautiful looks beautiful all of the time. No man, no matter how strong will fail to be as irritating as hell at some point  -  but there is such a thing as perfect for you.

And the answer lies in how much we think about it.

When I was dating my ex-husband - I had an ideal of what perfect was and he needed to fit it. His quietness, I put down to being deep. It was actually an inability to communicate. His inability to show compassion, I put down to being overwhelmed by situations and an unable to articulate it. He didn't have any. His lack of ability in sharing thoughts, I put down to being contented. He was simply devious. No matter what it was, I found a way of making it look peachy. It never was - I signed my own divorce papers the day I got married.

The reality was - I was thinking about it too much.

Perfect, is not a relationship in which you make everything fit. Perfect is when you trust someone enough that you just know that you don't have to think about it too much.

The last man I dated could have been perfect, but he wasn't and it wasn't. And sometimes it is merely a case of the wrong time, wrong place.  If he had been more self aware, perhaps he could have been. We got on with ease, we had some great times but emotionally - he was a long way behind me. And I wanted it to be perfect. Did I trust him? absolutely. Did I trust enough to be totally emotionally honest with him about my needs? No.

I was spending way too much of my time having to analyse some of his behaviour.  And one day I woke up and realised that it would never change and in sticking with it, I was compromising too many of the values that I knew were fundamental to what I knew 'perfect for me' needed. And so, he wasn't perfect for me. It was a hard call to make -  but  in doing the one thing I didn't want to do, I was doing the right thing for me. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong man.

It takes a long time to work out who you are and perhaps you never truly truly do. Yet every relationship teaches you something about yourself and what you need from those invited into your life.

The four years I have spent since my marriage ended have had ups and down. I have, without question loved the people I have dated. They were part of that journey and both taught me a lot about myself. And whilst I have associated those with a great deal of pain - they played a huge part in understanding the things that needed understanding.

Arguably, I met them at the right time for me to see how much I needed to sort my own stuff out , and because of that - the wrong time for it to have worked out.

Big toes with too much hair, an irritating facial expression, a habit of keeping you waiting when you are trying to get out, spending too long in the bathroom, superficial misunderstanding- none of that stuff matters.

But the bigger question such as how do you know if someone is right for you,

I guess you don't ask yourself.






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