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Perfectionists yearn for a love that resolves all of the basic conflicts inherent in experience.

Fundamentally, perfectionists strive to acquire endless options.

To challenge perfectionism, one is required to challenge the pull toward fantasy.

Blue Moon, a film chronicling a day in the last week of the life of legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart, features a notable aphorism about love. In the scene, Hart recounts a favorite book of his and says it taught him a valuable lesson: In love, one adores and the other allows themself to be adored. While this is a somewhat cynical take, it speaks to a significant truth, if discovered: 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. 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. What is love to the perfectionist? Is it having to accept some limitation, like the one described above? No. Love is everything at........

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