Understanding unrealistic expectations

A brother asked me to talk about unrealistic beauty standards by both men and women in seeking a potential spouse. He should be over six feet tall, chiseled jaw, six pack abs, 6 figure income. Okay. The money thing isn't really a beauty standard but it's a normal feature of female fantasies. She should have beautiful body, perfect face, brilliant smile, and be ridiculously passionate in bed.

Okay? These kinds of expectations are causing pressures on both sexes that they can't accommodate, creating feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness about ever finding a spouse who can accept them as they are, flaws and all. Okay. Here I think it's important to recognize that people's fantasies are usually distinct from what they will actually accept and ultimately cherish in their partner. See, don't think the problem is having the fantasy.

The problem is when either gender thinks that that fantasy is an absolute nonnegotiable requirement. Men have always had their dream woman, whether it's a Jean Harlow in the nineteen thirties or Marilyn Monroe in the nineteen fifties or whoever else in more recent decades. And the same goes for women. But both men and women also have sexual fantasies that they never fulfill and never really want to in real life. They are only pleasurable as fantasies.

That's the case for all sorts of fantasies. They are abstractions that are never supposed to be manifested in real life because real life in this dunya is too detailed and too mundane to not degrade a fantasy when you try to fulfill it. The beautiful woman in a man's fantasy obviously comes with a whole plethora of personality traits and qualities that go unsaid. Obviously, she's supposed to never be annoying. She's supposed to always be pleasing and presumably never uses the toilet or has gas.

The chiseled handsome man always knows what to do, always knows what to say, makes a perfect omelet, his socks don't stink and he never snores. These people only exist in the imagination and maybe in Jannah and no sane person actually holds out to find a partner who embodies that fantasy person. I think this is the problem with matchmaking apps and websites. When someone describes their ideal spouse, they are describing their fantasy person. That gives the other gender the impression that no mere mortal need apply.

But it's not like that. Believe it or not, your parents and grandparents also had fantasy men and women in their imaginations but they married who they married, they loved their husbands and wives and that's why you're here now. Unrealistic beauty standards are just that, unrealistic, and we live in the real world. We marry real people and we have or develop real feelings for each other. Love takes root in the cracks and blemishes of a person.

A premade fantasy person is too smooth surfaced to love. In real human interaction, fantasies don't apply. You see places in someone where parts of you can fit, like the teeth on a key fitting into the tumblers of a lock. No one really wants the fantasies that they describe, and not being that fantasy doesn't make you inadequate, it actually just makes you fit better with the right person. Ultimately, and here's the honest truth, we don't know what we want until we have it.

We don't know what will fit until it fits. All of the fantasy descriptions about the ideal spouse are just words to start the conversation. When she says, I want a man who's six foot tall with six pack abs and a six figure income, all she's really saying is, I want a man who will make me happy. And the same goes from the man's side. Don't let anyone's description of their dream spouse get in the way of you possibly becoming the spouse who they really want.

Never judge yourself against an imaginary person. Your real qualities will eclipse that abstraction if not for one potential spouse then for another. So don't take it too seriously when she says or he says that they want someone who is everything you are not. All of that can burn away very quickly when you start seriously talking about marriage. I hope that helps.