High fit

Radical Acceptance involves accepting reality as it is without fighting it. Eve Engel had constructed a detailed internal blueprint for her first kiss — including the non-negotiable condition that she could not initiate — and measured the actual experience against that blueprint, finding it lacking. Her counselor's statement that first kisses are supposed to be awkward functioned as a corrective to the gap between Eve's imagined reality and actual experience. Eve Engel stopped measuring lived events against an idealized internal standard, and her next kiss — spontaneous, initiated by her, on a subway platform — reflected that the expectation dial had been reset.