Dear Lover, Please Love All of Me — not Just the Good Stuff.

Most of us have experienced falling in love.

We meet. The stars align. DJ Universe plays all the right songs on the radio. The chemistry is sweetly perfect and we decide to pursue the dopamine rush, believing that this time it will be different.

Falling in love is like falling backward through space into, hopefully, the waiting arms of your teammates below as you pray they catch you in a team-building, trust exercise. Only this time, it’s one person you must rely upon to catch you, not several.

It’s a heady rush.

We, consciously or not, choose to trust our perception of this new person…after all, they smell so damn good, say all the best things, and feel so right!

Right?

Loving someone for who they truly are requires a whole lot of work, trust, and vulnerability. It is a depth of emotional intimacy that requires a conscious choice.

Many of us unconsciously choose to fall in love with who we think they can become. It’s so much easier because our focus is always on the perfect future just around the corner and therefore we can willfully ignore what is right in front of us, that is, the true and complete nature of our newly chosen partner.

We see only what we want to see and that vision is intently focused on the tomorrows that may never come. It sparkles with such allure!

This is called falling in love with someone’s potential. We employ creative and obstinate deafness and blindness in our effort to avoid reality because reality can be hard. We have a dreamy idea of what we think we want and set about cramming our new love interest into that unyielding framework.

We insist on viewing our prospective love through the lens of our own perception which, by its very nature, is skewed, singular, and unique. Our perception is rarely 100 percent aligned with reality. We hold onto all the wonderful things we’ve learned about them and combine that with all the things we see them capable of becoming.

The facets of their being that make them flawed — and therefore human — are adroitly ignored. We become victims of our own optimism. You know what I’m…