“The only three men I had ever imagined a future with all told me that something was missing,” Oz Johnson wrote in her Modern Love essay. When Oz was 23, her boyfriend said she met 99 percent of his criteria, but she was missing 1 percent. Over a decade later, another man broke up with her via email. Their love was almost perfect, he said, but not enough to last. What is this missing, unquantifiable feeling? Oz used to be haunted by these rejections, but now she has come to embrace the search for imperfect love. After: Nancy Cardwell wasn’t looking for love — but then, at 58 years old, she fell passionately in love with tango. Her newfound zeal for the dance took her to Buenos Aires, where she fell in love again — this time, with a man named Luis.
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Anna Martin: Last year, I was seeing this guy I called The Bartender.
And I was in a place where I was looking for something serious.
And pretty much from the jump,
I could tell that he was not.
He would take days to respond to my text messages.
We would hang out, like, once every three weeks.
It just — it wasn't really going anywhere.
So finally, I was like, you know what?
I'm going to end it.
And I wrote him something like,
you know, this has been fun,
but it's clear to me that we're looking for different things.
And it took him around 48 to 72 hours to respond,
because it always did.
And he replied, I think you're right.
It's too hard to make something work
when we live on opposite sides of the world.
This guy does not live in Australia.
He lives around 40 minutes away on public transportation,