I'm The Expert On Being Imperfect

When people find out what I do for work, they tend to assume a few things about me...

“You talk about relationships? You must be like the perfect boyfriend, right?” 

"What a fascinating job. I guess you and your girlfriend never fight, right?” 

“You’re basically a therapist for intimate relationships. You must be married, right?”

I get these questions on a weekly basis, and the underlying assumption is that in order to help people with any area of their life, you have to have flawlessly mastered the area that you’re advising on. Well, it’s time to burst some bubbles and sign my name on a reality check. I’m not perfect, no one is perfect, and no relationship is perfect. These days, I’m probably a better relationship partner than I ever used to be. I’m kind, compassionate, loving, and a world class listener. All of the things that I believe come along with my counselor-type brain, but I will never feed into the idea that I am a perfect person or a perfect relationship partner. 

I am not perfect. Here is my truth; I get triggered like everyone else. I have fears, insecurities and areas where I feel I fall short in my relationships. I unconsciously do things for external validation to overcompensate in areas where I was once told I was deficient. I work hard to keep up to examples that my parents who've been married for 55 years set. I also make a concerted effort to avoid doing other things that I've seen my parents who've been married for 55 years do (if that makes any sense). I can have abandonment issues, I sometimes struggle with low self-esteem, and I have to proactively invest in my self-care or else I’ll go into my workaholic man-cave. I am human. I’m a big, messy, complex set of character traits and personality quirks, and in no way do I think that it serves my readers or my clients in pretending that I have everything all figured out.

The reason why I have connected with so many readers in such a short amount of time on the radio, on the blog, on social media, either face to face or by phone is that I make no bones about the fact that I am right here in the trenches with you. I am a work in progress, and I always will be. I don’t hand out pearls of wisdom from atop an ivory tower somewhere, I’m battling through my emotional demons every day. I’m getting my hands dirty in the relationship trenches, just like you are. I’m going in first in this battle before I write any of these lessons for you to read. This is who I am, and who I always will be.

No relationship is ever perfect. It serves no one when people feed into the perception that they have a perfect relationship. YES there are some relationships that are strangely high functioning, compared to the majority, and I had the insanely good fortune of being raised in a household where I saw multiple examples of long-term loving marriages of several decades. The truth is, every couple fights (which is totally healthy). Every couple compromises (also totally healthy). Every couple frustrates each other with seemingly trivial bickering on almost a weekly basis until they grow out of it. This is just life as we know it to be, but the life no one is willing to admit. We’re all humans. We’re all a messy, complex set of character traits and personality quirks. To believe anything else is to have an anxiety-producing perfectionist mindset that will make your love life suffer through your expectations of what it “should” be. You’re going to mess up. Your partner is going to mess up. The magic in your relationship is in the courage that it takes to face it, accept it, and take ownership of those mess up moments.

We are all perfect, just as we are. So if we’re all united in our messiness, and we’re all just trying to love as best we can, then we’re all already perfect as we are right now. We are complete. We are whole. My favorite person has always been (and will always be) the one who is willing to look in the mirror and take responsibility for the person they see. There’s a difference between feeling like you’re never enough, versus feeling like you are always perfect and yet you can still change. The most empowering mindset I can think of to live by, is when I can say “I am already whole but at the same time, I can still strive for improvement.”

If you’d like to invest in someone who has done their work, in someone who is doing their work, and in someone who will always be doing their work, you can keep reading the blog, keep listening to the radio shows, or keep reaching out to chat with me anytime directly.

My words, no apologies...

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