A wise friend and I were talking one evening about relationships.

What makes an ideal mate?

We’re so used to answering that question in terms of shared interests (we can both tap dance on a balance beam! blindfolded! we both collect vintage French motor scooters!) or “qualities” that we fail to realize our lists are little better than tea leaves clotted at the bottom of a cup. Lessee, I’ll take his sense of humor up dry with a twist, and his politics neat, and 85 percent of American woman think a smile is the sexiest part of male anatomy, or was that 58 percent of American women smile at the sexiest part of male anatomy, and how tall is too tall? and take care to blunt your IQ until the second date, and be well-groomed but for gawd’s sake! don’t hide the smell of your sweat.

Labyrinthine, no wonder we’re confused.

So here’s what my friend said: the most important thing is that your mate have the capacity to hold in his/her mind/imagination all of what you are — of what you believe yourself to be.

This strikes me as one of the most profoundest statements about what we need in relationships that I’ve ever heard.

What is more important, if you’re planning to become intimate with someone, than to know that being in that person’s presence won’t render you somehow shrunk or truncated?

This is your life we’re talking about, remember — this is a person you’ve invited into your life, who for better or worse is going to influence the trajectory your life takes, whether you hit your target or fall short, whether you one day look back and know you gave it your best or die with the taste of regret coating your tongue.

So what’s it take for a person to really know you?

It’s partly a function of intellect — of choosing a mate who has the intellect to follow where your intellect takes you (and vice versa of course — all of this assumes it’s reciprocated).

But it also encompasses other aspects of Self as well: one’s spiritual nature, kinesthetic sense, capacity to appreciate esthetics, to name a few off the top of my head.

Or think of it this way: the romantic ideal is that some person will value you above all other potential mates. How can this happen if the other person is unable to fully imagine you as you imagine yourself to be?

It can’t. Entangle yourself with someone who is incapable of knowing you and you risk being under valued, because some aspect or aspects of you simply won’t exist to that person — perhaps he’ll sense them, but he won’t be able to appreciate them; perhaps she’ll have a fuzzy, unfocused idea that they’re there, but chances are she’ll feel uncomfortable and out of her depth around them.

It’s like offering a glass of most excellent Bordeaux to someone who can’t discern flavors more subtle than MSG-laced cottonseed oil. You might tell him “this wine retails for $350” or read off Robert Parker’s description or pass along the high praise of all your friends or even train him to appear that he understands what he’s doing, to swirl his glass and gargle the stuff through his sinuses. In the key of A. But in the end it will still be indistinguishable, as far as he’s concerned, from Chain Restaurant Merlot, the bottle that was opened three nights ago.

So why should he shell out the big bucks to drink it?

Answer: he won’t, unless he does so for the wrong reasons, and that will likely get old for him before long. And then he’ll dump out the rest of the case because he needs the bottles for, who knows. Storing his cigarette butt collection.

Now flip this around as a positive. There’s the old saw that behind every successful man there’s a woman (and the not-quite-so-old “Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.” Groucho Marx. ha ha ha ha) — the language is dated of course — this needs to be reciprocal as well — but at its heart there’s a truth: when the success you envision is also envisioned by someone who loves you, it has a steadying effect that can help you realize that success. It’s not just any woman standing behind that successful man; she’s a woman who believes he will be successful even when the rest of the world has no frickin idea.

And “success” is of course you realizing in literal terms what you are.

Love idealizes, of course it does, and there’s risk in idealizing. Speaking from experience here. So yeah, that image we hold, it can’t be fantasy. But if we can avoid that pitfall, it seems to me the image, and a lover’s capacity to experience that image fully and truly, it is the most important thing. The most important thing.

It’s your lover’s capacity to love you as fully and perfectly and specifically as we on this Earth are ever able to love.