PERSONAL: THE PERFECT GIRL IS A MYTH

Every man has a vague notion of the perfect girl, a subconscious image that he carries in his heart from his earliest years to his dying day. She is a symbol of all that he holds dear and cherishes in his soul, a compilation of all the traits that he desires in a woman. She is truth to him, and justice and beauty and love and life. His perfect girl might be sharply drawn in his imagination, well considered, or she might be vague and undefined, nothing more than a diaphanous collection of approximate curves or a preferred color of hair. His perfect girl might resemble a film star or someone he saw in a magazine or a dream conjured up from books he read in his youth. On the other hand, he may have no idea what the image of the perfect girl for him might be, but there is an image resident in his heart all the same. The media, of course, with its smoke and mirrors, does not help. All those carefully constructed women, artfully airbrushed and perfectly posed, leading us astray like the Sirens of old. “There, see? I told you there are perfect women in the world. It says so right here in this magazine.”

The perfect girl is one a man can show off to his friends, the one he can drape over his arm as he enters a room. A man daydreams this scenario all the time, in living color and detail; he can feel the surge of natural confidence and grace that only a woman like this can impart to him, this beauty who is with him and no one else. She is the one that he imagines would make him forget every other woman forever. Over and over again, time after time, we believe we have found “the one.” This is because every woman a man encounters throughout his life—the one he saw in the bookstore, the one dancing so seductively on the stage, the one he saw walking across the street, the one who is going on a date with him tonight—he subconsciously compares to his image of the perfect girl. He squints and scrutinizes, and in his eagerness to convince himself that this new woman is indeed his ideal woman, he blinds himself to everything about her that doesn’t quite match. Then over time, it dawns on him that this latest obsession of his is just a girl, nothing more. A girl with as many faults, fears, and insecurities as his own. She is no longer shiny and new.

When the realization hits that she is just a girl, that she is not what he has made her out to be, that she is not perfect at all, men deal with it in all kinds of different ways. Some men settle, accept their lot, and, rolling their eyes, dejectedly soldier on. They give her nothing of themselves from that day forward. They commute to their tired cubicles with their tired briefcases on their tired feet and return to their tired homes. Every single day. Except weekends, of course, when they mow the lawn and watch the game and fill their time with other things, other things, anything really. Unremarkable in every way. Some men get angry or mean-spirited and take it out on women—through neglect or verbal violence or physical abuse. It’s not her fault, yet he blames her and relentlessly sets out to punish her. Other men just abandon her.

The perfect girl is a myth. We will never find her. It is a search without end. Men have conquered the business world, they are captains of industry, they have interesting friends and fascinating hobbies, they build, they create, they do great and wonderful things. But they feel in their hearts, that they haven’t yet found her. The perfect girl whom we desire so intensely, who would make the world feel whole again, who would make us believe in love again, who would complete us, is forever out of our reach. This is a vision so perfectly formed and so lovely and so complete that no real woman could ever come close to actually being her.