It is a terrible burden I place on someone I decide to love. It is almost like a default reaction for me, an easy response, almost “natural”. I know what it is like to have this burden placed on me, so I am familiar with this experience from both sides.
It has happened to me many times. The person I love is not standing before me but largely exists in my imagination. There obviously is some reality to the situation, but I can also be swept away by my imagined lover. This can be both good and bad.
It can be good if it delivers the exhilaration of finding someone who really understands me, someone who is just what I want in another person, someone who is ideal. In a word, someone who is perfect.
It can be bad because it sets an expectation, a standard no one can measure up to. Reality disperses the hologram of a perfect lover, and disappointment descends. As I come to recognize who they really are, I realize that they are not the perfect one I fell in love with. It is easy to hold them responsible for not measuring up to my expectations.
I am most familiar with this dynamic as the one who did not measure up to expectations. I was not the one that someone fell in love with, and it took time for the reality to set in. I was not perfect. I was just good enough. The glass was not full, just half full.
The cultural pressure to fine the ‘perfect one’ as a beloved is so burdensome on us all. It has failure written all over it. There is no hope of joy if expectations are set so high. Loving based on reality, and a first step must be to get rid of all the fantasy, all the cultural images of a perfect relationship.
I am becoming more aware of how this works, and I try to break the spell of the imagined beloved. I am attentive that the perfect one exists only in my imagination, and I try to place that expectation and burden on no one and no one individual. I make it a daily practice of approaching people with an open heart and the intention to see them as they really are, not as my imagination pictures them. Seeing them as beautiful humans means they are all at least good enough. In this case, that says a lot.