The myth of the perfect man: still looking for a knight in shining armor? Author Alex Witchel explains why you shouldn't be deluded by your visions of a dream guy. (On My Mind).(Brief Article)

* He doesn't exist.

Well, easy for me to say now. But in my new novel, Me Times Three, the heroine, Sandra Berlin, is so convinced her fiance is the perfect man that she overlooks the fact that he's also engaged to two other women ... a situation that, unfortunately, is not as pathetic or even as extraordinary as it sounds.

Think about it. You know women who suffer from perfect-man syndrome. They catch it as soon as they feel scared and imagine they've struck gold by finding a magical man who knows all and can fix everything, at least in those precious moments when he's not otherwise engaged. This hero, admired from a distance that he almost always creates, is invariably a skunk in disguise. He constantly sends flowers and leaves messages on your machine (knowing you won't be home) to assure you he's thinking of you ... and then days go by without a word. You're so busy waiting for the next shipment of roses, you don't even realize he's probably off for the weekend with someone else.

When I was in college and spending a semester in Washington, D.C., my boyfriend, a perfect man, was a football hero bulging with muscles, a fraternity bigwig from a fancy family who wore a crisp white shirt like no one else. He was attending an Ivy League school in New England, and I saw him once every few weeks--a setup that allowed him to roam free, unbeknownst to me, in between appointments. Well, one day, I was in the Washington office where I was interning, and this nice guy who was not a student but a fledgling grown-up who actually got paid came over to talk to me. He knew that I was from New York and that I didn't much care for Washington.

"Do you know what D.C. has that New York doesn't?" he asked brightly. "Ruth ...