Having standards or being too picky?

What is the difference between standards and pickiness?

A standard is a requirement about how you are treated and whether the relationship can work: honesty, respect, kindness, reliability, safety, and wanting broadly the same thing you want. Pickiness, when the word is fair, means ruling people out on preferences that have little to do with how the relationship would feel: height, job title, a hobby you do not share, a clumsy first message.

You are not too picky for holding the first kind. No one should talk you out of expecting respect. With the second kind, it can be worth asking how much each item really matters to you, because research suggests that a list of traits is a weak guide to whom you will be happy with.

Most people have some of each, tangled together. Sorting them is the work.

Which standards are worth holding firmly?

The National Domestic Violence Hotline describes a healthy relationship as one where both people are communicative, respectful, trusting, honest and equal, where boundaries are respected and consent is discussed openly. Those are not luxuries. They are the floor.

A short list of standards about treatment might look like this.

• He is honest with me, including about what he is looking for.
• He treats me, and other people, with respect.
• He does what he says he will do, most of the time.
• He accepts "no" without pressure or punishment.
• He can talk about a problem without contempt or disappearing.
• We want compatible things on the questions that cannot be split down the middle, such as whether to have children or what commitment means.
• I feel safe and like myself around him.

What does research say about checklists?

Psychologists Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel have spent many years testing whether the qualities people say they want in a partner predict whom they are actually drawn to. Across speed-dating studies, a 2014 review and meta-analysis, and later large studies, their general finding is that stated preferences for particular traits do a poor job of predicting attraction once two people have met. One 2020 paper from Eastwick's group is titled "Negligible evidence that people desire partners who uniquely fit their ideals."

A separate project led by psychologist Samantha Joel, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, pooled 43 datasets of couples. The strongest predictors of relationship quality were features of the relationship as each person experienced it: perceiving a partner as committed, feeling appreciated, sexual satisfaction, perceiving a partner as satisfied, and conflict. Individual characteristics of either partner added nothing beyond those.

Neither finding says preferences are meaningless or that anyone should date people they are not attracted to. Together they suggest something gentler: the list in your head is a rough sketch, and how you feel with an actual person over a few meetings, appreciated, respected, at ease, is better evidence than how well they match the sketch.

Signs a preference may be narrowing your options

This is not a call to settle. It is an invitation to look at which rules are protecting you and which are simply habits.

• You rule people out before meeting them on details that would not affect daily life together.
• Your list has grown longer after each disappointment, as a way of avoiding being hurt again.
• You are waiting for an instant, overwhelming spark, and treat its absence as a verdict after one date.
• A requirement came from family, friends or social media, and you are not sure you hold it yourself.
• You notice relief when someone fails a test, because it means you do not have to risk anything.
• The same kind of person keeps passing your filters and the relationships keep ending the same way.

Signs you are being asked to lower a real standard

The opposite problem is at least as common. Women are often encouraged to overlook things that should not be overlooked, by relatives who want to see them settled, by friends who are tired of hearing about it, or by their own loneliness.

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2019, among single adults who said it had been difficult to find people to date, 56% of women said a major reason was that it is hard to find someone who meets their expectations, and 65% said it is hard to find someone looking for the same kind of relationship. Wanting someone who wants the same kind of relationship is not fussiness. It is the basic condition for a relationship existing at all.

You are being asked to lower a real standard if the thing you are told to accept is dishonesty, disrespect, unreliability, pressure, or a basic mismatch in what you each want. "Nobody's perfect" is true of table manners. It is not an answer to how someone treats you. If what you are being asked to tolerate looks like control or contempt, see red flags early in dating.

A way to sort your own list

Write down everything you think you want in a partner. Then mark each item as one of three kinds. Requirements are about treatment, safety and the big compatibilities; these stay. Strong preferences are things you care about and could imagine being surprised on. Habits are items you cannot quite explain. For each habit, ask where it came from and what it is protecting you from.

Then try turning trait items into treatment items. "Ambitious" might really mean "takes responsibility for his own life". "Funny" might mean "I feel light around him". "Tall" might mean "I want to feel attracted", which is fair, and which sometimes arrives in an unexpected shape.

If your list is tangled up with past hurt, it can help to look at it with someone. Laura Bass is a psychotherapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, who works with adults; individual counseling is a place to think about what you want and why. For more on what good treatment looks like, see what a gentleman actually is today, green flags and the rest of the dating guide for women.

One note on safety. No standard should ever be relaxed where you feel afraid. If someone you are dating frightens or controls you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is confidential at 1-800-799-7233; in an emergency call 911, and in a crisis call or text 988.

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