Are you a perfect 10?
Let’s back up for a moment. 10 was a 1979 romantic comedy in which a 42-year-old, George, who is feeling his middle age, falls madly in love with Jenny, who is married to someone else, David.
George almost wrecks his own marriage pursuing Jenny (played by actress Bo Derek), whom he rates an 11 on a 10-point scale.
George does finally get Jenny to bed, only to have her call her husband while George has her in bed to tell him what is going on.
It turns out that Jenny and her husband have an open relationship and George means nothing to her. She is everything to him; he is a casual throw-away to her.
The idea of the movie, of course, is that someone who seems to be one’s perfect 10 often can turn out to be a whole lot less.
Even if they seem to be a perfect 10 to you, you may be nothing to them. And once you get to know that perfect 10, you may go through a quick, or not so quick, disillusionment.
I didn’t need the movie to tell me that. I knew it from experience. I’d been there in high school. The woman for whom I fell head over heels at age 15 proved to me beyond all doubt that sometimes, beauty truly is only skin-deep.
What's a perfect 10?
Now, how about you? Are you a perfect 10? And what is a perfect 10 anyway?
Is a perfect 10 merely perfect physical appearance, like Bo Derek had? George finally decided that physical appearance definitely was not enough! He left Jenny behind and put her out of his life.
Is being a perfect 10 having great or at least ok physical appearance but a brilliant mind? Maybe like Albert Einstein?
Would you like to have been married to him? I suspect not.
Einstein horribly mistreated his wife Mileva Maric. He told her not to expect any intimacy from him, to stop talking to him if he requested it, and to leave his bedroom or study immediately without protest if he requested it. I suspect that’s not what you are looking for!
Is being a perfect 10 being a celebrity with millions of adoring fans? Well, maybe that doesn’t cut it either.
Bill Cosby had those millions of adoring fans, a great personality, and accusations against him of sexual assault by 13 women.
Then there was Roman Polanski, adored by millions for his mind-blowing movies; but then there also was the apparent rape of a 13-year-old girl, and Polanski’s fleeing the United States and the charges against him. He still hasn’t been tried, 44 years later.
And Actor Tommy Lee was reported repeatedly to have hit his wife, Pamela Anderson.
The list is very long. Don’t trust being a celebrity to make someone a perfect 10.
Well, enough of what perfect 10 is not. What is it? Or does it exist at all? I believe it does exist. But it’s not any of the things I have been talking about.
A perfect 10 in real life
Being a perfect 10 is finding perfect acceptance by someone—someone else or even yourself—for who you are, so long as you are making a serious effort to be the best person you can be for that someone.
It is acceptance for your strengths, but also for all your flaws.
The “perfect” person does not really exist. We all know that. They exist only sometimes in the movies, or maybe in our dreams, or maybe in religious traditions.
But in our lives, we will not find perfection.
What we can find is acceptance.
When we find someone who accepts us—with our unique strengths and weaknesses—we have become the perfect 10 to that person.
And when we accept someone else, just as they are, then we have found our perfect 10.
A perfect 10 is not a perfect person; it is someone we fully accept and embrace, with everything that makes them great, and everything that sometimes bothers us or even annoys the hell out of us. If we accept a person as they are, if we accept ourselves as we are, trying always to be better, we have found the perfect 10.