Biggest Flaws.

It’s Saturday night. I’m sitting on the couch in huge sweatpants watching “The Hangover,” eating Cheesecake Factory takeout, drinking mimosas and casually reading my Kindle. I’m still working my way through Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Committed.” I was kind of half-reading, half-watching the movie, half-slurping away at my drink. I hadn’t blogged for a few days, and I didn’t really know what to write about. I’m still feeling the February bitterness. Feeling it especially keenly this weekend as couples all over the country are celebrating Valentine’s Day with romantic dinners and red roses. I’m eating Bistro Shrimp Pasta with Korbel and watching possibly the least romantic movie of the century. But then I got to a passage in my book that made me put the TV on mute so I could concentrate, and I literally had to stop reading to blog about it because it was such a powerful thought for me.

I should start by giving you a few details on the book in case you haven’t been following Ms. Gilbert’s journey since “Eat Pray Love” was published. So she fell in love with a passionate Brazilian man during the last phase of her trip in Bali. She was recently divorced--so was he. They were madly in love in the most romantic, pure way, but they had promised themselves (and each other) that they would never get married again. They would mate for life, but never marry. Never share bank accounts. Never own property together. Never take each other’s last names. Then her partner was detained at the Dallas Fort Worth airport for suspicions on the frequency of Visas he was requesting to spend time in the US with Liz, his love. He was deported, and the officer suggested that the fastest way for them to be together in America (where Liz’s family, career and life existed) was for them to be married. Not an unusual suggestion for two adults in love, but this proposition was in direct competition with the life they had planned for themselves. The book is Liz’s journey in researching, contemplating, questioning what marriage is: why we get married, why we get divorced, how love flourishes in other cultures and how we can protect ourselves and our partners from making the biggest mistakes in our marriages.

Anyway, sorry for that digression. Let me share a passage from the book with you. As an attempt to prepare her partner for what a life with her will entail, Liz proceeds to list out her flaws matter-of-factly, prepared for her fiancé to run as fast as he could, but he responded with something I found so lovely, thoughtful and true that I need to share it on my blog:

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, “I can work around that. I can make something out of that”? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.

So in an effort to be honest about who I am and the challenges I cause in other people’s lives, I’m offering up a list of my biggest flaws—the things I’m most disappointed in about myself. The things I try to hide, but rarely successfully. M—listen carefully:

1. I am not good at forgiveness. I hold my friends, family and acquaintances to frequently impossibly high standards, and I don’t let things slide. Once someone has racked up an injustice against me, it takes a long time for me to completely trust that person again.
2. I am not a friendly person. I don’t make friends easily. I don’t like striking up casual conversations with strangers or even people that I don’t know that well. Why am I in sales?
3. I am an indulgent person. I sleep in; I eat bad food; I lay on the couch. My perfect day does not involve going to the gym, waking up early or anything particularly strenuous.
4. I am the polar opposite of an open book. I don’t like to share my feelings, and I don’t like to talk when I’m upset. I feel like people should know when I’m upset and then fix it for me. It works in the opposite way too. I don’t share my happiness. I expect others to realize the good things that have happened to me and congratulate me, and I get frustrated when they don’t.
5. I am not good at asking for help. I would never admit that I’m in over my head. I’ll just become a miserable, angry person trying to do it all. And then come home and cry alone on my couch.

Those of you who are reading this that know me well might be thinking that the list is much longer. I’m sure it is. Those are the top five that seem to challenge me most frequently. These are the wrongs that I repeatedly commit, even though I know I’m doing them. Even though I know I’m causing harm to myself and others. I’m not listing these flaws out because I think I can change them or because I want to announce to the world how awful of a person I am. I’m saying them because the people I love need to know these things. You don’t need to like them or agree with them, but you need to find a way to work around them. You can help me improve them or possibly eliminate them, but at the core of my core, these flaws are as big a part of who I am as my brown hair, my love of Nine West shoes or my library of books. And this might seem selfish, to say that people who love me must deal with this. I agree. I should by trying to improve myself (and I am), but I think it’s more important to be honest, up-front and blunt about these things. If we’re trying to hide our imperfections, particularly from the people we love, we’re just kidding ourselves. Our flaws are most obvious to the people who love us. Likely, they’ve already probably decided that they love us anyway, despite of the unlovely things about us.

So even though this post listed a lot of bitter things, I’m not feeling quite so down about February any more. It still is the month of love. But maybe, for me this year, February is a month of more honest, real love. Not the romantic dinners and red roses, but of the hard times we’ve made it through together. The heartbreaks, the losses, the sadness that has brought us together and made us stronger. That’s the real stuff. That’s the love that gets us through the other 11 months of the year, flaws and all.

To loving us anyway,

Lia