agree that true love is not merely the endurance of flaws — it is the awe of discovering someone’s irreducible reality beyond our projections. You are right to resist the notion that love is only about disappointment. To fall in love is not simply to watch an ideal crumble, but to marvel at the richness of another person, which no fantasy could ever capture. Love is the art of living with the whole field — the flowers and the mud, the beauty and the irritations — and finding that the imperfections are not obstacles but part of the texture of intimacy. Maybe your “statue crumbling” metaphor can be reframed as the collapse of fantasy into the more astonishing reality of another person.