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Blue Moon, a film chronicling a day in the last week of the life of legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart, features a notable aphorism about love. In the scene, Hart recounts a favorite book of his and says it taught him a valuable lesson: In love, one adores and the other allows themself to be adored. While this is a somewhat cynical take, it speaks to a significant truth, if discovered: Love can’t exist completely on our terms. We can’t own it. (But, if we did, we wouldn’t know how to manage it.)
This is especially true in perfectionism, in its absolute form to be specific. Here, all contradictions are magically made whole in one’s imagination. The perfectionist aspires to be perfect everywhere, all the time, and to everyone, embodying a plethora of seemingly incompatible traits, whose manifestations depend on the context—in essence, the perfectionist is a chameleon. This sort of thinking bleeds into one’s understanding of love, too. What is love to the perfectionist? Is it having to accept some limitation, like the one described above? No. Love is everything at once. Love is the thrill of chasing aloofness while bathing in admiration. It’s adrenaline but with security. It’s comfort without vulnerability. It’s the valley of an idyllic future but with the peaks of a tempestuous beginning. It’s equality but with an implied hierarchy, wherein one simultaneously is reaching but feels out of reach. And it’s the juxtaposition of “I need you but don’t love you” and “I love you but can’t have you.”
To even say that a perfectionist wants immature love fails to capture this reality. For in reality, it isn’t love at all. Love, like every other perfectionistic fantasy, is some nonsensical hodgepodge revealing the perfectionist’s true desire: limitlessness. If we consider perfectionism as sourced in a deep desire for control and an even deeper-seated fear of uncertainty, then love begins to feel impossible. But, again, it isn’t love that’s desired. When Lorenz remarks that love entails an adorer and an adored, he essentially tells his friend that all of us have to settle. With grandiose dreams, however, the idea feels personal, like an indictment of one’s core self. “Why should I have to settle?”
All of this is associated with limerence (the fixation on a love object that seems both attainable and unattainable, which often becomes all-consuming), maladaptive daydreaming (the preoccupation with an imagined world where all of one’s needs are met, yet the conflicts of each are somehow resolved or erased), and obsessive striving (always wanting more). The perfectionist is, thus, stuck climbing a ladder leading nowhere. There is no sense of what one wants or needs, what or whom they should pursue, or even what’s meaningful. Yet, all of that is hidden by the blinding light of hope, which invariably seems benign or even good. Unbeknownst to the obsessive seeker, happiness may be out of reach when your only goal is endless options. But, maybe that’s what you want, at least in part.
Accepting that your standard is one of the main reasons you’ll never fully be content can be a catalyst to making better, and more measured, choices. While this aspect of perfectionism, the inability to feel fully satiated, can feel suffocating, it can, counter-intuitively, also be liberating. Maybe complete satisfaction shouldn’t be the aim. Perfectionists, despite these conflicting pulls, can still cultivate good lives. But, several things need to happen. They need to understand how their sense of self-worth is tied up with absurd expectations of love and success. They need to see how their penchant for black and white thinking renders any realistic assessment of what’s meaningful impossible. They would have to reframe how to perceive ‘settling’ and why they consider themselves to be above it. Their partners would need to, if they want to stick around, de-emphasize the perfectionist’s fixations—to accept that perfectionists want what they can’t have merely because it represents some ridiculous ideal, which, like a vampire, is always burned by the flame of life. The perfectionist would have to commit to finding gratitude in what they have and what they’ve done.
The fantasy, and even its pursuit, is easy. So, lastly, the perfectionist is implored to acknowledge an intolerable weakness—their preference for ease. I used to tell people that I pursued success because it was easy, despite the apparent diligence involved. It wasn’t complicated, or was at least less so than the rest of life. My ambitions prevented me from thinking much and they liberated me from choosing, affording me the freedom from love, too. Limitlessness might be freeing and its pursuit, in all fairness, might be noble; there’s something really beautiful about man striving to overcome his limits. And while some degree of that is warranted, I stress that it can’t be your life’s overarching goal because then, there won’t be a life lived; it would be as though you never even existed. Whatever meaning is, it must be wrapped up in your choices, and if it’s associated with others (which I can’t imagine it not to be), then they have to feel that you chose them—with your time, space, patience, and humility. They need to know that you gave them some part of your actual existence, all the better if you sacrificed your fantasy.
