Sat, 2006-02-18 18:55

Lisa of Life of a demure college student has a wonderful parable about perfection.

I have a story that a girl at work told me and her dad told her. See, she is engaged but she wonders if he is the perfect man, she loves him and he is generous and loving back. He surprised her at our work with her Valentines present. He proposed on on their 2nd anniversary. So, she is talking with her dad and she says she loves him but she wonders if she is settling for less, that someone better might be out, someone perfect for her. He says “Do you know what happened to that girl that was waiting for the perfect man? She found him. But he was waiting for the perfect girl.” and there you have it, what is perfection?

Read her whole post here.

Oh I love that story. It’s a great variation on my favorite sex-related Murphy’s Law: Never sleep with someone crazier than you are. The chances that you’ll be the perfect choice of the person who’s perfect for you is… small.

I remember having one of those “fun with arithmetic” days years ago after being left irreparibly in the lurch by a long-term partner who left me for (a 20 year relationship with) another woman. I’d been lying on my back in the half-empty bedroom of what had once been our apartment which was now only mine thinking over and over and over “she was one in a million for me, she was one in a million for me, she was one in a million for me…”

I was obviously not one in a million for her.

Anyway since you can only do that for so long (in my case several weeks, but even so…) a new thought strayed into my head. “Is it true?”

It totally broke the cycle for me. Not the sadness, not the sense of loss, those wouldn’t go away for nearly a year. But it broke the cycle of hoplessness and despair.

It gave me a new problem instead. If someone does have to be one in a million… well, at the time that meant there were still roughly five people in my area code who were perfect for me. And if someone was going to be perfect for me she was probably close to my age, she was probably interested in the things I was interested in, probably had a background similar to mine… and probably lived somewhere nearby. Realizing there might be five one-in-a-million people living close enough that I might somehow meet them… well it didn’t exactly cheer me up but it broke that cycle big time.

But is it true? Is one in a million really the magic ratio?

I don’t think so. To be honest I think it’s lower. A lot lower. Mightent it be closer to one in 100,000? How about one in 50,000?

I’d already met a number of tremendously wonderful people. Yet I doubt I’d met even 50,000 people in my life.

But say I had. I’d certainly met dozens of people I felt that, under the right circumstances, I could have a lasting relationship with. So that magic number was even lower. I decided it was closer to one in a thousand, and to this day I think that’s about right.

But how to find even one?

Tough question.

Turns out, though, that as I was lying in my half-made bed, surrounded by empty cartons of Haagen-Daz there was an apartment JUST ACROSS THE STREET with its own lonely woman lost in her own lonely bed wondering her own lonely thoughts.

I never met her then.

Four years later a friend of mine, in grad school with a friend of hers, were completing a major project and called in friends of their own to help them with the assembly. My friend called me and a bunch of other people. Her friend called her and a bunch of other people. When I arrived I asked my friend “how can I help?” At the same time she arrived and asked her friend “how can I help?” Each independently said “well, you can go over there and paint those signs. So this woman, an unknown former neighbor, and I squatted in sweltering August heat painting tiny signs. And talked.

And talked.

And our friends and everyone else noticed.

And I’m not really sure we did.

And after my friend said “Are you going to call her?”

And her friend asked her “Are you going to call him?”

And we did.

It was a one in a million coincidence.

If we’d each met four years earlier, when we needed each other the most, in our lost and lonely apartments across the street… I’m not sure it would have worked.

Instead we met when we were open, available, but not lost, not sad, not really even lonely.

15 years later, two children later, ten thousand kisses and just maybe that many disagreements, through all manner of sicknesses and healths, of betters and worses, we’re still not perfect for each other…

But she’s one in a million for me

And if my math is a little off it doesn’t really matter because we weren’t really counting.

Perfection, as the girl in Lisa’s story didn’t understand, isn’t found. It’s made.