True love isn’t about finding someone who meets the criteria on your list.

We imagine our future love since we were little. We create a picture in our minds of what this relationship will look like, how it will smooth and mend all the little broken pieces of our heart and make us whole again.

We create lists, guidelines, expectations. We tell ourselves to wait for the perfect guy/girl and not settle for anything less. “Don’t fall in love with someone who isn’t what we deserve.”

Except the problem with doing this is that we’re unintentionally looking for something that doesn’t exist.

It’s wonderful to imagine a future love, to imagine him/her and all the ways that person will fill us. To see the relationship and how it grows through all obstacles, or becomes stronger through all obstacles.

It’s wonderful to learn from the heartbreak of the past and tell yourself not to fall in love with someone whose soul isn’t fully connected to yours, or not to give in easily. It’s good to remember that the right person will be selfless and caring, gentle and kind, or whatever other valuable quality you desire.

But you can’t expect your future love to be perfect.

You can’t force yourself to wait until the perfect person appears in your life. You can’t encourage yourself not to settle for anything less than the man who upholds your values ​​all the time, who goes with you to your mother’s house every day, or always stays up late with you and talks about it. dreams.

You can’t tell yourself you’re going to be single until you find the girl who is always authentic and positive, who will be the best wife, and who would do anything for you.

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Because yes, those qualities are wonderful, but no person will be able to be like that all the time.

No guy or girl will be able to put you at the center of their attention 100% of their day. No partner will be willing to stay up late every night at work just to talk to you about life. No other person will ever stop doing what they are doing just to give you the attention you need.

There is no perfect person!

True love isn’t about waiting for the perfect person or the person who meets all the criteria on your list. True love is finding an imperfect person and building a life together.

We all want our current relationship to be better than the one we had in the past. We all want to be with a person who will not hurt us, who will make us forget our pasts, who will give themselves to us and not hold back. We all want the kind of love we see in the movies – two intertwined hearts that live happily ever after and don’t have any problems. We want to believe that the perfect exists and that we will find it.

TRUE LOVE IS FINDING SOMEONE WHO JUST FITS, AND STRUGGLING TO FIT, EVEN WHEN THE PIECES GET RUGGED AND WORN OVER TIME.

But the truth is, true love is full of chaos. It is full of frustrations and disappointments, arguments and compromises, annoyances and misunderstandings.

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Neither of the two people will ever see eye-to-eye at the end of every fight. Neither of the two people will ever be able to put aside their differences or emotions to make things better again. There are no two people who always say and do the right thing, or are capable of selflessly loving every minute of the relationship.

True love is difficult. But that’s what makes it so amazing. It’s not about finding the perfect person. It’s not about falling into a relationship without barriers and frustrations. No! It’s about finding solutions to the problems that will arise together!

Again: True love is finding someone who just fits, and struggles to fit in, even as the pieces get jagged and frayed over time.

True love is knowing that you are not with the perfect person, because he/she doesn’t exist, but you love him/her despite that.

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Love your relationship not because it’s everything you’ve dreamed of, but because it’s healthy, wonderful, difficult, exciting, and everything in between.

So stop with the lists. Stop with expectations. Stop demanding. Stop lusting after the perfect person and believing that you must remain single until you stumble upon them.

There is no perfect person. But there is a heart that will beat at the same rate as yours. There is someone who will understand your past pain and do their best to never hurt you again. There is a soul that longs to love you in the best way he or she can.

And I hope you wait for that person – the messy, the inconsistent, sometimes unreliable, the imperfect person who sees and loves, all the imperfection in you.

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