‘They’re perfect except for…’

Quick — name one thing that you simply cannot abide in a mate…

Chews with their mouth open? Catholic? Annoying laugh? Wears dreadlocks? OK, but what if everything else about that dreadlocked braying Catholic was absolutely fantastic?

Barbara, a 53-year-old social worker, was divorced with grown children and had sworn off men for several years until she met Allan. Also divorced, Allan was well established, witty, kind and charming.

“We hit it off immediately,” says Barbara, “and I was surprised to find myself considering getting involved again. My husband was self-absorbed and hadn’t been very nice to me for quite a while. I had decided that men were more trouble than they were worth but when I met Allan all that changed. He was fun. I hadn’t had fun in a relationship context in a long time.”

After a few months, though, Allan confessed to Barbara that he enjoyed cross-dressing.

“He sat me down and very seriously told me he liked to dress up in women’s clothing. He only did it at home, he said. He never went out dressed up. He would just put on music and hang around the house. I didn’t know what to say. Cross-dressing? Like most people I thought that was a gay thing.”

In fact, plenty of straight men like to dress up as women. In Allan’s case, he said it wasn’t necessarily sexual and he didn’t suggest he and Barbara try it out in the bedroom. Regardless, she only dated him once after that.

“I just couldn’t do it. Call me closed-minded but I had to draw the line somewhere and that was my deal-breaker.” Now single again, she says, “I feel like I gave up what could have been an otherwise perfect relationship, though, and sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision.”

Cross-dressing is obviously an extreme example but the question this tale begs is what do you do when you meet someone who is almost perfect for you, except for one glaring thing?

Maybe it’s their fashion sense. Maybe it’s their weight (a big one) or a dietary issue — you’re a strict vegetarian, they like big bloody steaks — or a financial one. Perhaps it’s their taste in music, political views (another big one) or religion. Does that thing have to be a deal-breaker?

Can you change them? Should you try?
A lot of people will start thinking here that this is where change comes in. A gentle nudge in the right direction, a stern lesson, maybe an ultimatum.

Perhaps if you take your date shopping you can show them the light of a fashionable pair of pants. A few articles about the cruelties of factory farming should zap the delicious right out of that striploin. Some heated debates on the healthcare and welfare systems should change those conservative leanings to a cushiony, leftist, viewpoint. And then there’s the old, ‘If you don’t start showing that kid some discipline I am outta here!’

That’s one way of handling things. But here’s a wacky notion: Before doing this you might want to think long and hard about what you can live with, why certain things are so important to you and even whether they are as important as you think.

Stephen van Beek, a psychotherapist and founder of the Toronto Therapy Network points that the times they are a changing.’

“It’s pretty clear that the capacity to compromise nowadays is based on economic status in a way that it never was before.” He says. “People can in fact have a decent lifestyle without having a partner so the notion that they need someone to financially secure their life doesn’t play the way it used to. It used to be, particularly for women, that if she needed a man as provider, there was more tolerance and submission, if you will, for the behavior, ideas and so forth of the providing partner.”

And this is good, in some cases. You don’t have to put up with someone who beats you or has constant affairs. The unfortunate flipside is a perhaps delusional sense of entitlement and set of unrealistic expectations — for both men and women.

“Boomers tend to have acquired more social narcissism. We think it’s all about choices and that if this one doesn’t work I’ll get a different sized partner or one with a different haircut. We sort of go through life tuning up for the ideal partner. Our tolerance levels for frustrations are low.

“People get the idea that it’s possible to find human perfection and that out there is the ideal person. We don’t say enough to ourselves ‘Am I the ideal person?'”

So, what is and isn’t insurmountable?
If your partner’s religion is of the utmost importance this may be something you can’t compromise on. Or if your vegetarianism means so much to you that you couldn’t bear being with someone who didn’t share your values, then… maybe. But really, how important are their pants? How important is their car or job? (OK, with the caveat here that that they have one or are independently wealthy. Nobody’s saying you need to take in the homeless.)

Van Beek says, “Image is important. That a person have the right type of job, dress right and so forth. That gets in the way.”

I’ve seen online profiles that stipulate “You have to have a job and I don’t mean working in a gas station.” But really, what’s wrong with working at a gas station? Maybe if you weren’t holding out for a CEO or a movie star you wouldn’t still be single.

Are your politics really so important or are you perhaps afraid of discovering you’re not right about everything? Are a few extra pounds such a big thing? Is your own butt all that great?

“The things I think are insurmountable are cruelty and mean-spiritedness. That is the bottom line,” says van Beek. Meaning that anything else is potentially negotiable.

“Tolerance,” he muses, “really means ‘bearing a weight.’ It comes from the Latin tolerantia. Toleration is a difficult thing. It’s not an automatic thing. The differences are hard to bear. Love is what allows us to like people who are not much like ourselves.”

Article courtesy of Click by Lavalife.

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