"My family had all kinds of complications in relationships. I would like to meet the person who did not. Since when is being absolutely perfect what being a human is? What do we gain from that?"

Anthony Edwards points to a simple, liberating truth: families are messy, and so are we. By challenging the fantasy of the “uncomplicated” person, he normalizes the rough edges of love, history, and habit that every family carries. The suggestion isn’t that pain or dysfunction should be excused, but that expecting pristine relational records sets us up for disappointment and denial rather than growth.

The rhetoric of perfection promises certainty, control, and safety; what it delivers is isolation. Perfectionism discourages curiosity and repair, punishes vulnerability, and replaces empathy with judgment. If the standard is flawlessness, then mistakes become proof of unworthiness rather than invitations to learn. Under that pressure, people hide, lie, or disengage to preserve an image, eroding the trust that genuine intimacy requires.

Complications, by contrast, are the curriculum of relationship. Conflict reveals needs. Misunderstandings surface difference. Boundaries are discovered, tested, and clarified. Apologies and amends build resilience and mutual respect. When we accept that everyone arrives with a private inheritance of fears, loyalties, and blind spots, compassion becomes practical: we expect imperfection, so we prepare for repair.

The questions Edwards asks, since when did perfection define humanity, and what would we gain from it, invite a reckoning with the cultural machinery that sells spotless narratives: social media curation, self-help absolutism, and the commodification of “healthy” relationships. Even if such perfection were achievable, the price would be steep: less spontaneity, less play, less permission to be contradictory or to change. We would trade belonging for performance.

A more humane standard is “good enough”: honest effort, accountability, and the courage to keep showing up. Instead of chasing flawless families, we can cultivate practices that make imperfect love workable, clear communication, boundaries, humor, and timely repair. The reward for abandoning perfection is not chaos but connection: a shared capacity to hold complexity together without giving up on one another.