When we enter into a relationship with others, we never emerge unscathed. Our affections clash with the reality of the world and the materiality of our body. And the world does not hesitate to tame life, more often than not by obliging us to repress our feelings, to conform to the expectations of others, to submit ourselves to collective judgment. This is what happens when we punish our body with diets or plastic surgery, in order to make ourselves ‘attractive’ and demonstrate control over our physical self. This is what happens when women are told how to be ‘normal’, even when it comes to sex. And this is what happens when the law robs us of the ability to dispose of our bodies when illness makes any improvement impossible and removes every dignity, or when a couple is denied the chance to conceive by artificial insemination. Michela Marzano examines the times when the rules and expectations of perfection that the world forces on us mortify our bodies and desires. How can we reconcile authenticity and conformism, uniqueness and identity, passion and reason, desires and social norms? And what if the truth were precisely there, in that imperfection that we carry within us and attempt to deny at all costs? And what if it were only in the instant that we renounce perfection, that we can live our lives in full?