Almost: Slightly short of; not quite; very nearly but not exactly or entirely.
Some people are “Almosts”. They are almost what you want for the job. Almost what you want for a friend. Almost what you want in whom to date or marry. And out of all the people you meet only one (if you’re lucky) will be more than almost for this last category.
Q: Then are we doomed to meeting and disentangling ourselves from one almost-the-person-you-want-to-marry after another? A: Pretty much.
A friend and I recently had a conversation about Almosts where the term “deal breakers” was brought up. It quickly became apparent that deal breakers are not a categorical do/don’t do... they are a continuous range from very specific to all encompassing. For example, he suggested a deal breaker was not being married in the Church. As if that was one deal breaker. But really it was a whole lot of them all summed up (i.e. faithful religious observance, certain dress code, certain health code, etc.). The implication being that some poor person could find themselves disqualified from the “marriageable” list for any number of reasons… they could be an Almost for any number of reasons. And not necessarily the stated reason: “I can’t marry you in the Church,” would be vague to the point of meaninglessness. A true statement but not really anything that one could hang their hat on, so to speak… nothing they could address as a personal point of self-improvement or dismiss as nothing they needed to act upon.
I found myself wondering how many poor girls had been head over heels for this guy and found themselves quietly but firmly dropped without a real clue as to what just happened. The funny thing was that my friend had not thought of his one deal breaker as a summation of multiple deal breakers until that conversation. So I flipped my mental question on it’s ear and wondered how often my friend had set a girl aside because she was an Almost to him without really knowing why he’d just done that. A quick mental review found many friends who had a long list of Almosts in their history because of so called deal breakers that were vague, shifted with their mood or just dumb.
Seeing people as Almosts is a double edged sword: It’s a nice way to let people go without putting them down, getting angry at them or placing blame. It’s also a way to keep from exploring your own motivation and thought process behind labeling someone an Almost. A fine line exists between saying someone is an Almost so you can let them go without endless attempts to make a relationship work when it should be let go or using it as an excuse to avoid examining your own needs and motivations.
For example: I have a non-LDS friend who has been infatuated with at least a couple LDS women, two of them he can’t get enough of even though they won’t seriously date him. Yet he staunchly proclaims them Almosts… or rather, proclaims himself the Almost because even when asked to do so he is not willing to change those things about himself that make him clearly not LDS. Never once have I heard him stop and ask himself what he finds so dashing wonderful about these women that he wants them in his life and what he should do to get those qualities more intimately in his life.
Worse yet, you can use the category of Almosts to avoid truly coming to know yourself. For example: I was recently proclaimed an Almost. Mutual friends professed being mystified when the guy made his choice because they though I splendidly fit the bill of what this guy said he wanted. He tried to explain it to them. But in the end it came out muddled- presumably a representation of the muddled state of his thinking about what he actually wants out of a woman. This did not stop him from blithely going on in his self-contradictory state because in his mind I was the one who was not desirable and he was perfectly clear. With mutual friends all invested in his and my happiness and willing to help further those states (whether we got together or not) he could have used his rejection of me as a chance to come to know himself better, but he didn’t.
Robert Frost debated this very issue. “Good fences make good neighbors” (said the neighbor). But there was an important question before the neighbor’s answer: “Before I built a wall, I‘d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out”. It is not the use of proclaiming people Almosts that I suggest must be done with introspection, indeed I find the whole idea very helpful. Rather, as did Frost, I like to really understand whom I am including and excluding and most importantly: Why?