What struck me about the argument wasn’t the disagreement itself—it was how modern it felt. Not modern in the sense of being progressive or enlightened, but modern in the sense of being quietly impossible.
My partner said she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She listed it out almost clinically. She’s demisexual. I’m bisexual. I have an ex-wife. I have kids. That’s not just history—that’s logistics, obligations, emotional residue. We don’t agree on everything politically. We don’t always respond to stress the same way. Our rhythms don’t perfectly align. There are differences in how we see the world, how we process it, how we express it.
And as she spoke, I realised something uncomfortable: everything she was saying made sense.
Because if you were to design the “ideal” partner today, you’d probably start with compatibility matrices. Sexual alignment. Emotional intelligence. Political harmony. No complicated past. No children from previous relationships. Shared interests, shared goals, shared communication styles. Someone who arrives fully formed, unburdened, frictionless.
But that person doesn’t exist. Or if they do, they exist in such small numbers that finding them becomes a kind of romantic lottery.
So I said something that, at the time, felt almost like surrender—but now feels more like clarity.
“If you tick all those boxes,” I told her, “you’re never going to find anyone.”
Not because standards are bad. Not because people should settle. But because we’ve quietly raised the bar to a point where it filters out reality itself.
At a certain age—and we’re both well past the age of blank slates—everyone has a story. Not a neat one. Not a curated one. A real one. With exes, with mistakes, with attachments that don’t disappear just because a new relationship begins. Baggage isn’t an anomaly; it’s evidence of having lived.
And difference? Difference is inevitable. The idea that two people will align perfectly across sexuality, psychology, culture, politics, and temperament isn’t just unlikely—it misunderstands what relationships are.
Relationships aren’t built on perfect alignment. They’re built on negotiation.
What matters isn’t whether two people fit together seamlessly. It’s whether they’re willing to do the work of fitting together at all.
That’s the part that often gets lost. We’ve become very good at identifying mismatches. We can diagnose incompatibility within weeks, sometimes days. We have language for everything now—attachment styles, love languages, sexual identities, trauma responses. All of it is useful. All of it helps us understand ourselves better.
But it also gives us an almost endless list of reasons to walk away.
And sometimes, walking away is the right thing to do. There are real dealbreakers. There are situations where staying would mean shrinking yourself, or ignoring something fundamental.
But most of the time, the differences aren’t catastrophic. They’re just… inconvenient.
And inconvenience is where love actually lives.
It lives in the space where two imperfect people decide that, despite the misalignments, despite the histories, despite the fact that this isn’t the clean, ideal version of a relationship they might have imagined at twenty-five—they’re going to choose each other anyway.
Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s real.
I remember saying to her, toward the end of the argument, something I hadn’t planned.
“You don’t find someone who fits your life perfectly,” I said. “You find someone you’re willing to build a life with—even if it’s a bit messy.”
That’s the shift. From selection to construction.
From “Is this person right for me in every way?” to “Is this someone I want to figure it out with?”
Because if you wait for the person who ticks every box, you’ll be waiting forever. And not in some tragic, romantic way—in a quiet, ordinary way. Dates that don’t quite land. Connections that almost work. A slow accumulation of near-misses, each one justified, each one reasonable.
Until one day you realise you’ve optimised yourself out of love.
What I felt in that moment with her wasn’t certainty that we were perfect for each other. It was something more grounded than that.
It was the recognition that, in a world where everyone comes with complications, we had found a set of complications we were both willing to live with.
And maybe that’s what choosing someone really is.
Not finding the person with the least baggage.
But finding the person whose baggage you don’t mind helping carry—and who, somehow, feels the same about yours.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
