I’m a girl, and like most girls, I attend slumber parties, and at most slumber parties, we talk about boys. One night five of us girls had each found a cozy niche in the dimmed room, some sprawled on the bed, and others immersed in a pool of pillows. We were all in deep thought as we pondered the answer to a question which had been posed by one of the girls: What is your boyfriend criterion?
Every girl has a list. She dreams of the perfect guy who will come along and sweep her off her feet. He’ll be tall, dark and handsome, someone who plays the drums, snowboards and likes cats. Some girls’ criteria can be as short as three words long, while others need sixty adjectives to describe the perfect guy. Nevertheless, every girl has some sort of idea what her knight in shining armor will be like.
She dreams but she doesn’t know why. She knows very well that no one guy will ever fully fulfill the criteria. She also fears that the man that does will not be someone she loves. And still deeper down she suspects that the man she may fall head over heels for is most likely to be the complete opposite from that figment in her imagination.
It’s like going through life with a recipe. You clutch onto a list of ingredients, hoping to find each one and place it in your love cauldron, but some items are just hard to find. Most of the time people just trade one ingredient for another and simply compromise. And after all that hassle, there’s a chance that you’ll find all the ingredients and still end up disliking the dish.
It’s a scary prospect to think that you’ll never meet “the one.” Some, more resigned romantics simply say “you MAKE it the one.” Others who insist on a balance in life say, “you should try your best to BE the one for someone else too.” Still others, the cynical romantics—if such a thing even exists—say “everyone is destined to be with someone, but you may never meet that someone.”
Whatever your stance, most would agree that there is no such thing as perfection. It is a forever-elusive concept and a fleeting dream. Perfection is relative to everyone and who says what’s perfect is best? Whatever the dish, as long as it tastes good and we love the food, it doesn’t matter if it’s missing an ingredient or two.