On “Stop Looking for the Perfect Partner”
 
Modern Love is my personal favorite series on the New York Times podcast. The series is centered around the theme of love and how the world is made up of three main emotions: family, friendship, and love. It is the intertwining of these three emotions that allows us to see all that the world has to offer.
The blog I listened to this time is called "Stop Looking For The Perfect Partner". After listening to this blog, I felt as if I had some doubts, as if something was missing. I asked myself silently, "What's missing"? What went wrong? Maybe this so-called absence was just a self-created excuse.
We all know that no one is perfect, which is why we are always looking for people who are imperfect but perfect for us. I once read Haruki Murakami's 100% Perfect Girl, which describes a girl who seems ordinary but exudes a subtle charm in the author's eyes, like the allure of a freshly plucked rose. She is not perfect in the strictest sense of the word, for perfection itself has no clear criteria, but arises from mutual understanding and compatibility.
Perfect love, in other words, so-called true love, is the recognition that there is no such thing as a perfect person, either for yourself or for someone else, whereas true love is the belief that there is someone out there who can make you a little bit better, even if it's just a little bit.
I must admit that I am a perfectionist. In everything I do, I always strive for excellence and leave nothing to chance. Therefore, I can understand the feeling of "something is missing". However, I also deeply understand that nothing is truly perfect and we can only do our best. Whether in life or in relationships, what we should strive for is wholeness, and wholeness does not mean perfection. Rather, it means accepting the fragmented pieces of life because they are equally important parts of the whole.