Materializing the Perfect Relationship

Reader Amanda asked me to describe how I materialized the perfect romantic relationship, and I’m happy to share the details.

Do you know how sometimes you get trapped in the same failed relationship model and just can’t get out of it? You know that this kind of relationship is not working but you keep recreating it with one person after another like a crazed woodpecker down to the smallest details. Once you get over the impulse to attribute this problem to the generally low quality of men / women, you will inevitably realize that the only common denominator in all these identical and sucky relationships is you.

When this happened to me, I decided to spend some time figuring out what kind of relationship I actually wanted instead the one I kept having. I began to imagine my life with my ideal partner.

It’s Friday morning. We wake up. Together? Separately? What are the first words we address to each other? What do we have for breakfast? What do we talk about over breakfast? What do we look like? How are we dressed? What is the emotional tonality of our interactions? My preferred emotional tonality is cloyingly sweet but yours might be gently ironic or one of quiet camaraderie or whatever else that feels right to you.

I imagined every detail. For months, I carried my ideal partner with me everywhere, living within the emotional mood of the relationship before it happened. The only thing that wasn’t working out in my vision of this perfect relationship was that I had a VCR tape of old Soviet movies that I wanted to watch with my perfect guy. But as I imagined watching them together, the question of language was fraying the fantasy. I knew I’d never end up with a Russian person but who else would be able to understand the movies? I tried to incorporate into the fantasy an image of myself doing a synchronous translation of the movies. I even practiced actually doing it but it was weary work.

On our first date, N told me that there was an old Soviet movie he really wanted to re-watch but didn’t know where to find it. The movie was the very first one I had on my tape. If I needed any more proof that he was the ideal partner I had imagined, that was it.

I recommend this method not only for your romantic life but for everything else. If you don’t know what you are doing with your life, try this approach. Think about your ideal life. What does it look like? What does it smell like? How does it feel? Go deep into the details. You wake up in the morning. You open your eyes. What do you see? Who do you see? What is the room like? What clothes do you put on? And so on.

When I was a teenager, I did this exercise for “what I want my life to be like when I’m 40” because 40 felt like extreme old age. I am now living that life I imagined, and please realize that I was imagining it not only from another continent but from another reality. I got even the colors of my future outfits right, even those colors did not exist in the 1990 USSR.

The method works.