The Perfect One

Song of the Moment: How We Breathe by Pinback

"I like him, but he’s not my ideal guy.”

These were my friend’s words as she explained her weird dilemma. She was feeling bad about failing to recognize the things the guy did for her to show his intentions. She eventually appeared cold even if she was interested in him. What struck me the most was this: She couldn’t imagine being with the guy anyway because he wasn’t “her type.”

My friend was partly a victim of unconsciously and unnecessarily weeding out the guys she thinks she won’t like. Many times, we look at a man or a woman from head to toe and consult our checklist before we even decide to explore dating. He has to be taller than me. She must be very organized with her things. He has to be a gentleman. She must be nurturing. He has to be earning an X amount of money. She has to have at least 34-25-34 vital statistics. We do a natural selection in our head and as a result, often unconsciously shut out those people who do not pass the criteria. Which is, off the top of my head, 90% of the population? We’re seriously doing something wrong here.

My friend has been single since birth, and she admits that she doesn’t know how to deal with people. Okay, point taken. But what she also has to realize is that the only way to find the Perfect One for her is to explore the vast ocean of fishes with an eye for opportunity, not by making a list of qualities in her logical head and finding the puzzle piece of a man to match. I say, go ahead and go crazy with your hits-and-misses! I can’t really claim to be an expert in matchmaking, but I realized that I had to flirt with/date so many boys/guys/men and go so far as being heartbroken 4-5 times (and I’m only 24 years old!), before I was able to find the perfect one for me. And the funny thing was, HE turned out to be the last person I would date. When I first met him, I tried to entertain the thought of dating him. Note, I don’t leave any stone unturned and look at every single person as an opportunity. But somehow, I always ended up cringing at that idea back then because he was too arrogant, too tall, too lanky, a bit unreliable, etc.

What I thoroughly didn’t expect was change. (And I should have expected this because change is after all the single constant in this world, right?)

He changed. And I changed. Somehow, our desires found each other, and at the end, it could not be helped anymore. “It just happened,” as many of those How-To books will tell you about finding the Right One. “It just happened” seems so difficult to understand, but you see, “It just happened” was actually an end result of years and years of trial and error. It was a result of years and years of slowly and unknowingly being prepared for the one person I was meant to be with.

My father would tell me, “You have to lessen your perfectionism, because you’ll always find yourself stuck at the planning, and never even reaching the execution. You have to trust that things will just work out, even if you haven’t completely thought things through.” The truth is, no matter how good a planner you are (which I apparently am), sometimes the hit-and-miss approach is the only way for you to open up doors you never knew you had the keys to.

We can’t always expect that the road to finding the Perfect One will be a smoothly-paved road; there will be an abundance of roadblocks along the way. We can’t always expect that the people we’ll meet will fit our criteria; for all we know, our criteria for the Perfect One may not even be the right criteria for who we are. We just have to keep looking forward, seize opportunities as they come, make mistakes along the way and reap the ultimate gift of being prepared for the Perfect One.

And while you’re at it, enjoy the ride!