Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Perfect people don't stick around

We're drowning in the myth that the people worth loving are somehow above being human. Social media has only made it worse—we curate perfect versions of ourselves and then feel betrayed when the real person behind the screen turns out to have actual flaws, actual bad days, actual opinions we disagree with. But Lessing is pointing at something liberating here: the people most worth trusting are the ones honest enough to have faults you can actually see.

There's a strange safety in this. When you're waiting for someone to be flawless, you're always braced for disappointment. You're holding back. But when you accept that your closest friend is sometimes petty, or your partner occasionally does something thoughtless, you stop looking for reasons to leave. You settle into the harder, richer work of loving someone real. The fault lines become proof they're not going to evaporate on you—they're actually there, dependable in their imperfection.

This doesn't mean accepting cruelty or toxicity. It means recognizing that small contradictions, quirks, and shortcomings aren't flaws in the relationship. They're features. They're what makes someone worth staying for, because they're worth seeing clearly. The people who love you best usually aren't the ones performing perfection. They're the ones willing to be fully known.