Imperfect Love and the Perfect Couple

Imperfect Love and the Perfect Couple is Sugar’s account of why a lasting relationship cannot be judged by an image of spotless harmony. Its decisive distinction is between perfection as an outsider’s ideal and a couple’s own sense that sharing a life remains right, even through painful failures. The essay challenges the belief that love’s worth depends on never being wounded, while insisting that honest reckoning and repair are not the same as pretending nothing went wrong.

The ideal couple and the hidden history

A twenty-nine-year-old woman writes after a weekend away with her much older half sister, with whom she has grown closer and more equal over time. The sister and her husband have been married for twenty-five years, remain best friends, and have raised two children, travelled, and shared interests. To the younger woman, they had served as proof that happy marriages were possible. That reassuring picture changes when she asks her sister for the secret of marriage and hears that both spouses had doubted the relationship’s future at different times.

The sister reveals that her husband had a months-long affair, while she herself had a brief, technically unconsummated fling that she chose not to disclose. She says the couple eventually repaired these breaches, though not easily. The revelation does not erase their affection or shared life, but it does expose how little an admired marriage can be known from the outside. The younger woman recognizes that their happiness was not a façade, yet feels shaken enough to question whether they should walk her down the aisle. Her response shows how the ideal of the perfect couple can turn other people’s complexity into an apparent threat to one’s own hopes.

A private definition of perfection

Sugar argues that an immaculate couple is impossible either to perceive honestly from outside or to live up to when other people impose that image. The label can confine the people who receive it and exclude everyone whose relationships do not match it. Instead, perfection belongs to the couple’s private understanding: its defining feature is that the two people feel right about sharing their lives, including when the relationship is difficult. In this account, “perfect” does not mean without conflict or error; it names a mutual conviction that can persist through both.

The sister’s confession, Sugar suggests, was not meant to disillusion her younger sibling. By revealing the struggles concealed within the marriage others admired, she was offering a more truthful account of what made it endure. A long relationship can be happy and humane without being unbroken. Its history includes the breaches and the work of repairing them, rather than a clean record that could serve as a simple guarantee to someone else. Sugar therefore considers the sister and her husband fitting people to accompany the woman at her wedding: they have kept their love and friendship alive for more than twenty-five years, not because every year was easy, but in spite of the difficulties.

Infidelity, fear, and repair

The letter writer and her fiancé have agreed that infidelity would end their marriage automatically, without discussion. She regards it as a deal-breaker and fears that accepting anything less would mean one day doubting whether their marriage could last. Sugar recognizes the impulse’s appeal: an advance ultimatum can seem to offer control over a painful possibility. But that control is false if it substitutes a threat for the difficult work of understanding what happened and deciding how to respond.

Sugar describes infidelity as common in long relationships in many forms, while explicitly allowing that not every couple will face it. People may cross boundaries through desire, loneliness, alcohol, boredom, sorrow, weakness, or other pressures; the possibility cannot be made to disappear simply by declaring beforehand that there will be no conversation. Her point is not that betrayal is harmless or that every couple must reconcile. Rather, she urges the woman to consider the complex capacities of both herself and her future husband, instead of treating a rigid rule as proof that a marriage will remain safe. The essay’s emphasis falls on confronting what a relationship actually becomes, not demanding that it conform to an imagined spotless future.

Sugar grounds that counsel in her relationship with Mr. Sugar. A couple of years into their relationship, she learned of his infidelity, told him to go away, and then took him back. She says the choice to stay and work through the aftermath became one of the best decisions of her life, and that, after years of resistance, she became grateful the crisis had happened. The betrayal forced a continuing conversation about sex, desire, and commitment, and gave the couple resources for later challenges. Sugar does not call them perfect: the early sweetness of their love had not yet made them ready for each other. The rupture and the reckoning helped them become a couple able to meet conflict directly, rather than a couple untouched by it.

Love after loss

The essay’s larger idea of imperfect love also resonates with Sugar’s writing about bereavement. After Cheryl Strayed’s mother dies, Sugar recalls that the last word her mother managed to say was a single expression of love. Cheryl Strayed had not been present when her mother died in the hospital, and for years replayed the choices that kept her away. In her memory, their final encounter includes the mother’s inability to bear the pain of being touched, Cheryl Strayed’s promise to return in the morning, and the mother’s response as she was leaving. There is no later chance to change that last exchange. Love remains, but it cannot make the death or the separation acceptable.

Months after the death, while clearing the home she had thought of as home, Sugar found a glass jar filled with stones her siblings and she had collected as children. They had pressed the stones into their mother’s hands, and the jar’s weight briefly made Sugar feel as though she held her mother. The smooth, dark stones had been called worry stones; their pleasing shape was associated with soothing the mind. Yet the jar could not restore the person she hoped to find in it. The objects offered a moment of closeness while making the limits of that closeness unmistakable.

More than twenty years after her mother’s death, Sugar no longer expects to solve grief or recover what was lost. The stones her children give her have replaced the stones she once gave her mother, and she keeps especially good ones in her pockets, finding them with her hand. The gesture marks change without suggesting that love has transferred neatly from one person to another. In another letter, Sugar tells a bereaved father that his love for his dead son remains his own, and that grief may change shape with time without ceasing to matter. The life that follows loss is neither restoration nor emotional closure.

The meaning of a life that is not spotless

Across these relationships, Sugar distinguishes accepting complexity from declaring pain acceptable. A bereaved friend tells her that it will never be okay that their mothers are dead. Sugar recognizes the truth of this even as she describes both women as happy and fortunate in their adult lives. Their grief has accompanied graduations, weddings, books, and the births of their children: it is not a daily display of sorrow, but a continuing absence carried through milestones. Similarly, a couple may remain loving after betrayal without making betrayal inconsequential.

The phrase A bit of sully in your sweet gathers this refusal of easy purity. Sugar’s answer to the younger woman is not a prediction that her own marriage will encounter infidelity, nor an instruction to surrender her values. It is a case for approaching love without the illusion that advance certainty can protect it from every human failure. In the essay, a durable bond is not proven by an untouched history. It appears instead in continuing acts of attention, honest conversation, repair where possible, and the willingness to keep making a life shaped by what cannot be undone.