Stop Looking for the Perfect Partner

Modern Love

The New York Times

Society & Culture, Nyt, Nytimes, Loss, Redemption, Storytelling, New York Times, Love, Essay

4.3 • 9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“The only three men I had ever imagined a future with all told me that something was missing,” Oz Johnson wrote in her Modern Love essay. When Oz was 23, her boyfriend said she met 99 percent of his criteria, but she was missing 1 percent. Over a decade later, another man broke up with her via email. Their love was almost perfect, he said, but not enough to last. What is this missing, unquantifiable feeling? Oz used to be haunted by these rejections, but now she has come to embrace the search for imperfect love. After: Nancy Cardwell wasn’t looking for love — but then, at 58 years old, she fell passionately in love with tango. Her newfound zeal for the dance took her to Buenos Aires, where she fell in love again — this time, with a man named Luis.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Last year I was seeing this guy I called the bartender, and I was in a place where I was
0:16.0	looking for something serious.
0:18.6	And pretty much from the jump I could tell that he was not.
0:22.8	He would take days to respond to my text messages.
0:26.3	We would hang out like once every three weeks.
0:28.5	But it wasn't really going anywhere.
0:30.8	So finally I was like, you know what, I'm going to end it.
0:34.1	And I wrote him something like, you know, this has been fun.
0:37.3	But it's clear to me that we're looking for different things.
0:41.0	And it took him around 48 to 72 hours to respond because it always did.
0:45.6	And he replied, I think you're right.
0:48.6	It's too hard to make something work when we live on opposite sides of the world.
0:54.9	This guy does not live in Australia.
0:57.8	He lives around 40 minutes away on public transportation.
1:01.2	45 of like the trains are really crawling.
1:05.0	So what kind of stung that that was his reason we need to end things.
1:08.8	But the more I thought about it, I realized I was looking for someone who was willing
1:13.5	to make a commute, who wouldn't see the distance between us as this like insurmountable
1:19.4	problem, but as something we could work out together.
1:23.4	And now I'm dating someone who lives 48 minutes away even further.
1:29.6	He bikes, I take the bus, which really means I call a lift, and we're making it work.
1:50.3	In the New York Times, this is Modern Love.
	...

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