"Love is everything at once. Love is the thrill of chasing aloofness while bathing in admiration. It's adrenaline but with security. It's comfort without vulnerability. It's the valley of an idyllic future but with the peaks of a tempestuous beginning. It's equality but with an implied hierarchy, wherein one simultaneously is reaching but feels out of reach."
"The perfectionist aspires to be perfect everywhere, all the time, and to everyone, embodying a plethora of seemingly incompatible traits, whose manifestations depend on the context—in essence, the perfectionist is a chameleon. This sort of thinking bleeds into one's understanding of love, too."
"Love can't exist completely on our terms. We can't own it. (But, if we did, we wouldn't know how to manage it.) This is especially true in perfectionism, in its absolute form to be specific. Here, all contradictions are magically made whole in one's imagination."
Perfectionists pursue an idealized version of love that resolves all contradictions simultaneously—combining opposing qualities like security with adrenaline, comfort without vulnerability, and equality with hierarchy. This perfectionist fantasy extends beyond love to all aspects of life, where individuals strive to embody incompatible traits and maintain endless options across contexts. The perfectionist's approach to love fundamentally misunderstands its nature, seeking complete ownership and control rather than accepting the inherent limitation that love cannot exist entirely on one's terms. Challenging perfectionism requires confronting the seductive pull of fantasy and recognizing that authentic love demands accepting constraints and relinquishing total control.
Read at Psychology Today
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