Kana is one of my best friends. We’re so compatible that I always thought our friendship was perfect: we’d always be in sync, and in agreement. We’d always bring out the best versions of each other. I was applying what I call “the illusion of perfection” to our friendship. I was being a friendship perfectionist.
It was easy to maintain the illusion of perfection when we saw each other every now and then. Kana lives in Chicago, and I live in D.C. But then in 2018, we traveled to the Philippines together. Ten days on trains, jet-lagged, in the heat, and eventually we spatted.
We always had this amazing friendship and the disagreement made me wonder if the friendship was as amazing as I thought. One crack in an otherwise perfect friendship and I struggled to not plummet the significance of the entire friendship. I was approaching our friendship with perfectionism, assuming that when one thing is wrong, the friendship is wrong. I had to learn to bring nuance to our friendship, to let go of the illusion of perfection.
The ability to face and work through conflict with Kana has made us closer than ever—much closer than when we pretended conflict could never exist between us. In friendship, I realized, you can love someone, feel close to them, and they can make you feel so seen. But there’ll also be times of mismatch, where you’re pebbles grinding one another’s gears. At these times, it’s important to remember that perfectionism is incompatible with intimacy.
How to Stop Being a Friendship Perfectionist
True intimacy comes from surviving and working through difficult moments rather than pretending they’ll never happen. Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner distinguishes between two types of safety in relationships, “the flaccid safety of permanent coziness,” maintained by ignoring anger and conflict and pretending problems don’t exist and the “dynamic safety whose robustness is established via… risk-taking and its resolution—the never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, separation and reunion.” Dynamic safety, Golder suggests, invites trust and fosters true intimacy.
Letting go of friendship perfectionism means realizing intimacy that isn’t perfect is all the more amazing because it’s real.
For more on friendship, order my book: Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make- and Keep -Friends.
Note: This article is cross-posted on my Psychology Today blog.
