How do I be imperfect w/ a perfectionist partner?

On top of that, though, it's also important to remember that an effective and healthy boundary is rarely going to come in the form of "I am asking you to stop or change X behavior". Obviously there's no universal "correct" answer when it comes to mental health and emotional safety, but reorienting towards an "If X occurs, this is what I will be doing" construction might be worth a shot as well. Wishing the best for you both! Navigating stuff like this as a couple is tricky and it's awesome that you're giving it so much thought.

Omg thank you so much for replying, it's so great to hear from the perfectionist's side. Yeah, that's exactly what's happened, little creeping patterns of me not respecting his time or seeming like I'm forgetting repeated conversations have slammed in all at once. A few days ago, there was a big incident where I hurt him right in a core wound without meaning to. He was deeply disgusted with me. I said I'd been consciously trying to be mindful and I'd slipped up. But he was disgusted by the idea that being loved meant sometimes being hurt by my mistakes. We seemed to be doing better the next day. But then we got into another tussel, and he said that he'd be better off alone since nobody can be perfect. I disappeared for the rest of the day. When I finally came back to make dinner, I put his salad on the same plate as his chicken, even though he prefers it separate, because I thought it through and figured that since there weren't any sauces or anything touching each other, it would be fine. But he jumped down my throat for it. He said a pattern was congealing that I kept doing things we'd already had conversations about. It's not like him to get so upset at me so easily. It feels like things are at a breaking point. He's suddenly gone from nonconfrontational to freaking out if his boundaries aren't respected perfectly. Like, he used to at least acknowledge that it's not fair to demand perfection from me, but now I can't move an inch without screwing something up, and he acts deeply wounded by every little mistake and uses them to confirm I'm just as bad as everyone else in the world who's hurt him by not caring. It's hard to both take accountability for my actions and say that it's normal to make mistakes sometimes. He wholly rejects the idea of imperfection anymore, he thinks I'm just screwing him over intentionally like the rest of humanity. He's being super black and white. And he gets triggered so easily that I can't even address things without him losing the ability to think rationally. And seeing him withdraw triggers *my* ocd to try to keep reaching for a solution. Also fyi he's started trauma therapy, but he says he's still getting comfortable with his therapist and hasn't started working on anything. The wounds that get triggered will probably take years to heal anyway. But like, what am I supposed to do in the meantime, when he's re-traumatized every time someone makes a mistake that harms him? I'm afraid to act at all anymore. What How did your partner get through to you? What did they do that started to chip away at your insistence they be perfect? When you felt genuinely hurt by a real mistake they made, what was the right thing for them to say to you? What did they do to help you feel safe with them even though they were imperfect?

@Anonymous So, good-news-bad-news. The bad news is that it's taken me a couple of tries (and at least one messy breakup) to start feeling my way through how to do these things. The good news is that there *are* ways to deal with it. The... secret third thing kind of complicated news is that part of the solution is the same whether you're in the perfectionist's shoes or you're the one feeling like you just can't get anything right (a position I've *also* ended up in with a whole different set of loved ones). You can't control what he'll react to, or how he'll react. And you're right: perfection isn't achievable, not within reason. What you *can* control is yourself. Your own actions. I know it's a pretty stale adage, and I've definitely fallen into the trap of leaping from "I can only control my own actions" to "Well if I can control my own actions, then clearly I should be able to choose not to hurt people! What's wrong with me!" But the thing is, the *instant* a second individual is involved enough to be reacting to you, you no longer have full control of the interaction. That other person is going to feel feelings and think thoughts, and you don't really get much say in what they are. Which *sucks.* You have my sympathies. But, back to good news, *because* you have control over your own reactions and choices, there are things you can do to exercise some agency here. It's perfectly reasonable to want to support your partner while he's going through something as destabilizing as starting trauma therapy can be, and it's awesome that you're trying so hard to hold space for him while he works through some deep wounds. *And.* There's no amount of past trauma or present distress over that trauma that gives anyone carte blanche to treat someone else poorly. You have just as much right to set boundaries as he does, and I would recommend trying to orient them around *your own* behavior rather than his. "Hey, I know I messed up here, and I'm open to feedback, but I'm not accepting the assertion that I'm doing this on purpose. I'm not going to engage in conversation about what happened until we can approach it from a different angle," as an example. The scary and uncomfortable part is that 'not engaging' is the extent of what you get to control. He gets to decide whether to work through what's going on with him internally and try to reconnect or not.

@Friend to Birds To answer your questions more directly and concisely: unfortunately, it took me some hard lessons to start unpacking my demand for perfection from both my loved ones and myself, and some of my relationships didn't recover. Now, I know that what I was really grasping for was stability, consistency, and presence, and I've been able to shore some of that up internally so it's not falling entirely to my partner. As far as 'the right thing to say' goes...there isn't always a right thing to say. But genuine acknowledgement of the hurt tends to be a good start.