Is My Imaginary Boyfriend Stopping Me from Falling in Love?

Petra Fürst
1 day ago
3 min read

My love life has always been the most complicated part of my life. Tangled up in waiting, hope, disappointment, insecurity, and longing. Love, in that sense, has always felt out of reach.

So I turned to someone who could never disappoint me or make me feel insecure and sad. He was handsome, kind, caring. He was simply always there.

Every now and then, over the years, I would hear someone say, or realise it myself, that I idealised men, relationships, and love. But it was only later that I realised exactly how I was doing it.

I convinced myself that finding a partner would solve the problem, answer the countless questions my mind had been asking. I created someone in my head who was perfect, but also someone who was impossible to compete with in real life. Anyone who wasn't like him, or at least remotely close, would be written off.

For the past few years, I would say that I no longer had a specific type of man I wanted to meet. I had let go of almost all the little things I once wanted him to have. Of course, it still mattered to me that he was kind, intelligent, and attractive to me. But if he showed me that he wasn’t actually the person I had imagined him to be, something about him would suddenly feel off. I would find him slightly off-putting.

Why does he wear Converse? His beard is too long. And his nails are too short. Of course, none of these things were deal-breakers on their own, but taken together, I guess for me they actually were.

There were also men who weren't exactly difficult to write off. Men I should have written off much earlier. It was actually difficult to find the balance between “Nobody is perfect, give him a chance” and “This guy is an asshole, write him off.”

But I think it's important to allow other people to be imperfect. Ted Mosby once said:

“Shouldn’t we hold out for the person who doesn’t just tolerate our little quirks, but actually kinda likes them?”

What if I am actually the one who needs to see something beautiful in the fact that someone is simply real? Of course, one thing is Converse, a beard that's one centimetre too long, or nails that are too short. Another thing is everything that belongs in the container we call a red flag.

And if we expected a little less perfection from ourselves, it would also affect our search for someone we think we could share our life with. At the end of the day, maybe what matters a little more is how we feel around that person than whether they have the hair we want them to have.

Don't get me wrong, standards are incredibly important, just as it's completely okay to have certain preferences about the kind of partner we want to meet. But finding the balance between not writing him off because he doesn't look like Andrew Garfield and writing him off because he's a loser who doesn't appreciate you, I think that's important. And for some of us, myself included, finding that balance can actually be quite challenging.

We've all heard a story from a friend, or at least an acquaintance, whose boyfriend definitely wasn't her type at first, and now they've been happily together for years. I think there is something to that. And maybe there is something to simply giving someone a chance, even if he doesn't quite match our idea of a dream guy in every way.

I think my realisation didn't come when I became aware that I idealised men, but when I understood how I was actually doing it, through my everyday thoughts, behaviours, and the reasons I would write them off.

So I realised that, in order to allow myself to fall in love with someone, I had to allow him to be real, just as I had to allow myself to be real, too. And most importantly, I had to end a years-long relationship with someone who had made it impossible for me to see someone’s flaws alongside their virtues, and their unusual habits alongside the ones I found interesting.

I suppose that's why love always felt out of reach: because it was idealised. And the problem with an ideal is that it exists only in our minds. We won't find it anywhere else.

And an imaginary boyfriend is actually kind of boring, too. We already know everything he's going to do. Maybe there is someone better in real life. Not more perfect, but more interesting, more unexpected, and ready to love us in a real, genuine way.