Beauty and the Pedestal: Perfectionism and the People We Love
By Adham Moustafa
The Friend in the Mirror
A friend asks you about the outfit they're wearing. It looks good and everyone already confirmed it. Yet your friend hesitates on their choice, and you recognize the discomfort the outfit may cause them throughout the day. What happens when someone is brave enough to name that discomfort?
An honest thought is all they needed to hear to make the change that would later bring them comfort. "Thank you, that's also what I thought! I really needed to hear it from someone else." Feedback that was almost taken away by the expectation that friends should only compliment instead of provide the hard truth. The honest interaction challenged that expectation and resulted in a more authentic relationship.
The Pedestal We Build
We carry images of the people we love, and those images are not always an accurate representation of them. Relationships don't falter due to unmet expectations; they falter from a self-built version of the person in front of us that isn't truly them. This is the pedestal we create for others, ourselves, and our relationships. We find ourselves disappointed when undefined needs and expectations are placed onto someone who never agreed to them. It can develop into a false understanding of our partners and friends, leading to disappointment when the images don't align. It comes from a place of wanting and perfectionism that isn't necessarily fair. An imagined checklist of how this person should operate and the pressure to relate to the world as you do. But they don't hold the same blueprints as you, and even if you handed it to them with clear instructions, what do you think happens to their plans?
You send a text you find hilarious to your best friend, and they react mundanely. Is it their actual reaction that is upsetting, or the fact that they didn't respond the way you expected? It can feel shattering as the image you've built is destroyed instantly. Yet all they did was have a genuine reaction to what you sent. That pressure pushes the people around us into a performative guessing game, where they slowly stop responding as themselves and start responding as the version of themselves we seem to want. This feeds the false image we conveyed in the first place, and now both people are sustaining a relationship in which neither is showing up as themselves.
Hope Disguised as Love
Idealization isn't something we intentionally do. It is something we develop, something that evolves with us. These idealizations can happen romantically, platonically, and very likely internally. We go through the world hoping people will understand us, but how we relate to others requires work from within. For some, this also connects to attachment patterns formed long before the relationship began. Some draw lines on the ground and set rules with little communication and call them boundaries. Others hope someone will fit their romanticized pedestal and ruminate on how it became unrequited love. This is the true nature of the beauty they obsess with, the beauty they attach to, and the beauty that can become dependence. Few are brave enough to acknowledge how hope can be disguised as love. No one can fully be who we imagine them to be; they can only be themself. Loving someone and expecting them to be someone else is just unfair to the human experience. We all deserve the space to plant our own expectations and goals. Pedestals transform our partners into plucked flowers, slowly losing their petals. Idealism turns us into beasts unable to figure out why the petals have fallen, why they don't stay on the stem, and why they aren't as beautiful as they once were. The roots are disregarded and dismissed by an illusive image. Fear of losing that image can poison us. The same way the Beast imprisoned Belle in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, gripping to the idea that she would be the one to lift his curse. It's only when he lets her go that he is able to recognize the fulfillment he was trying to attain and the forceful casting of a hole that could only be filled from within, and when she finally allows herself to really see who he is and not just who he could be. It no longer becomes about lifting the curse, but about replacing it with something completely different. Dare I say, love.
We must hold ourselves accountable for the role we play in keeping these pedestals standing. Our fear of disappointing or upsetting our loved ones offers easy reassurance instead of honest reflection. We tell them they look great, that everything is fine, that they are doing enough. We let them perform a version of themselves we know is hurting them, because naming it feels harder than agreeing. The pedestal is not just something we build for someone. It is something we hold up together. Real love asks for the harder thing: to see them clearly enough to tell them what they need to hear, and to trust that they can handle it.
A Story of Layered Pedestals
Sometimes the clearest way to understand the cost of pedestals is to watch someone else explore them. Walking through another person's garden, even a fictional one, can reveal patterns in our own.
Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is a novel about the progression of tragic relationships bonded by trauma and demonstrates the difficulty of revealing what is actually beneath the person we have built in our heads. The protagonist, Toru, slowly discovers that his deepest relationships have layers and layers with no single root core. He is forced to see the people in his life as they are, not just what they are meant to be. A process that is hard to unravel and even harder to begin. His journey leads him to see how people in his life relate to him and what parts of them he yearns for or even fears. As these supporting pedestals unravel, so does the version of himself that depended on them. Finding himself shaped by years of trauma in a forest of fallen petals, destroyed by pedestals.
The Flower and the Dancer
While we prance around these beautiful decaying flowers, we don't expect the toll it takes on the dancer. The dance can become ritualistic, the pedestal now being placed on ourselves, an obsessive compulsion of how the dance must be and what will impress the flower. The flower on the other hand never asked to be plucked, captured in one phase of its cycle, a selfish act by the dancer to validate their desires. Both participating in what can feel like a staring contest that yields no room for error and even less room for help from others. Both committed to painfully not hurting the other. A perfect dance the flower can never fully see, because it is not something the flower can do. The flower seeks fertile soil to grow, and the dancer seeks the decorative gleam the flower provides, but neither is able to be true to themselves together. A relationship that can feel like a tide pushing and pulling away. The flower can only provide so much life, and the dancer's recital is too complex to become a garden for the flower's roots.
But what happens when you are the one to pluck yourself or you no longer have the energy to dance? When we stay in relationships that drain us, we don't realize we are doing this to ourselves. We forgo our insight by pressuring ourselves to be the perfect dancer or the strong flower. Constantly worrying, hoping you are doing the right thing. The pedestal is not always something we build for someone else. Sometimes we build it for ourselves, and we hold ourselves hostage to a version of who we should be that may no longer exist or never did. Both parties must be aware of their role and be open to change, so the flower can be planted where it belongs and the dancer can dance freely in the collaborative garden.
On Loving Conditionally
It all comes back to love and how we show and receive it. The concept of conditional and unconditional love is the drive of these relationships. It reveals the rules and circumstances required to access and provide love, which may or may not flow in people abundantly. I believe
it can be healthy to love someone conditionally; it serves as a mechanism that protects us from connections that may threaten our well-being. There is something meaningful about modeling accountability for ourselves first, learning to recognize what we need before asking others to provide it. This isn't about being a pushover or rigid. It is about knowing yourself well enough to love someone without losing who you are in the process. Being with someone who has defined their love language and how they communicate it shows signs of maturity and willingness to grow. To be understood while understanding and seeing the person in front of them provides security in a relationship. Some of us, through trauma or not, simply don't know yet, which is why therapy is such a good place to discover how we want to be loved and the methods we enjoy loving others with.
When Differences Become a Problem
It is important to notice the uniqueness an individual can bring. Each developing their sense of self and how they relate to the world. Some prioritize hobbies and embark on glorious adventures, some work and organize the world around them for their comfort. The expression "opposites attract" can apply here, but only if we acknowledge how it can quietly cause destruction. If one dancer loves to dance and the other finds it terrifying, every dance floor becomes a breeding nest for conflict, especially if one person is neglecting their interest and pushing their values onto the other. The same can happen with smaller things. One partner wants to sleep in on vacation, the other wants to be up at sunrise. One is messy and leaves things everywhere, the other is driven insane by clutter. Both have the right to live their lives how they want, but it only becomes healthy in nature when the messy person desires to be more clean and the clean person wishes to be more chill. The difference here is the intention, the clear interventions both parties agreed on to develop a relationship they are both thriving in.
Differentiation
What separates a difference that strengthens a relationship from one that erodes it often comes down to something therapists call differentiation. Murray Bowen first introduced the concept in family systems theory, describing it as the ability to maintain a clear sense of self while staying emotionally connected to others (Bowen, 1978). David Schnarch later extended this idea into the territory of romantic and intimate partnerships, framing differentiation as the capacity to hold onto yourself in the presence of someone you love, especially when they want you to be different (Schnarch, 1997). It is the ability to disagree without disconnecting, to be close without becoming the same. When two people are differentiated, their differences can complement each other. When they are fused, those same differences become threats to the version of each other they have built.
What Is Left
When the pedestal comes down, what is left is the actual person. Brighter, messier, achingly real. Their own glow, their own wild orbit. Perfectionism in relationships is rarely about wanting too much. It is about wanting the wrong thing, the polished image instead of the living person. Loving them is no longer about preserving an image you built before you knew them. It is the continuous choice to keep seeing them as they change, and to let yourself be seen the same way. The dance is no longer a performance. The flower is no longer plucked. All are planted, and all are growing.
If you or your loved one are experiencing feelings of perfectionism in your relationships and want to explore how you show up in those relationships, please feel free to book with one of our clinicians below.
References
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
Murakami, H. (1987). Norwegian Wood. Kodansha International.
Schnarch, D. (1997). Passionate marriage: Keeping love and intimacy alive in committed relationships. W. W. Norton & Co.
Trousdale, G., & Wise, K. (Directors). (1991). Beauty and the Beast [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.
