How to Set Dating Standards Without Creating a 47-Point Checklist for a Human Man

Sometimes we go into dating so frustrated with the whole thing, or yearning for connection so badly, that we say something like:

I just want a good guy.

Which, in reality, means basically nothing.

What is a good guy?

Good to his mom?

Pays his taxes?

Doesn’t cheat?

Owns a Costco membership?

We need a little more information.

Or we swing all the way to the other extreme and develop a checklist that includes height, job title, travel preferences, texting cadence, gym frequency, music taste and whether he owns exactly the right pair of shoes.

Also not especially useful.

The real challenge is figuring out which things actually determine whether a relationship will work for you.

I trust that most of us are reasonable enough to understand that if the man we are dating does not own the exact shoes we prefer a man to wear, we can probably survive.

Hopefully.

But that admittedly ridiculous example gets at something important:

Standards, preferences, compatibility and deal breakers are not the same thing.

And when we throw all of them into one giant list, dating gets unnecessarily complicated.

Standards Are Not the Same as Preferences

A standard is about behaviour and treatment.

It is something you require from a partner in order for him to participate meaningfully in your life.

For me, standards might include things like:

Honesty.

Consistency.

Respect.

Emotional availability.

Accountability.

Those are not aesthetic preferences.

They affect the actual quality of the relationship.

A preference, on the other hand, is something you would really like in a partner but could theoretically live without.

Maybe you prefer a certain physical type.

Maybe you love somebody who travels.

Maybe you want someone who is social.

Maybe you prefer a man who dresses well.

Preferences can still matter.

Attraction matters.

Lifestyle matters.

Enjoying the person you’re dating matters.

But preferences serve a different function.

A standard helps determine whether somebody gets meaningful access to your life.

A preference helps determine how naturally you enjoy having him there.

Those are different jobs.

And there is research behind the general idea that our partner preferences matter — but not necessarily in the neat, checklist-style way we imagine. A large international study found that matching a person’s overall pattern of partner preferences had a modest relationship with how positively they evaluated potential partners, while matching on individual traits tended to matter much less. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Which sounds about right.

The whole person matters more than whether he checked item number 23.

Compatibility Is Another Category Entirely

Two perfectly good humans can be completely wrong for each other.

Nobody has to be the villain.

Nobody has to be defective.

Sometimes the lives simply do not fit.

Maybe you eventually want fully integrated families and he absolutely does not.

Maybe you want to get married again and he is completely opposed to marriage.

Maybe you want more children.

Maybe he is absolutely finished having children.

Maybe your faith is central to your life and he has no interest in religion whatsoever.

Maybe you approach money very differently.

Maybe one of you wants to move someday and the other cannot imagine ever leaving home.

Maybe you have a lot of flexibility in your schedule and his life is so jam-packed that there is almost no room for a relationship.

Maybe regular communication is extremely important to you and that is simply not how he operates.

That does not automatically mean someone is wrong.

It may just mean that the life he is offering is incompatible with the life you want.

And compatibility is not some fluffy bonus category. Research on dating and relationships consistently finds that unique compatibility between two people contributes to romantic interest and relationship development beyond whether someone is simply broadly desirable. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Sometimes we turn incompatibility into:

Okay, but who is wrong here?

Maybe neither of you.

Maybe you just want different things.

Deal Breakers Should Actually Break the Deal

This seems obvious.

And yet.

If you have explained your deal breaker to four girlfriends, your therapist and God while continuing to date him, we may need to revisit the definition of a deal breaker.

A deal breaker is something that, once you have enough accurate information to know it is real and material, means:

This relationship does not work for me.

Not:

I hate this.

Not:

This really irritates me.

Not:

I have now delivered a 45-minute presentation about why this behaviour is unacceptable, but I’ll see him Friday.

It needs to actually affect the decision.

For me, dishonesty is a good example.

If I am in the early stages of dating someone and discover that he has been materially dishonest with me, that will seriously affect whether I continue dating him.

There can also be lifestyle deal breakers.

I really do not want to date a cigarette smoker.

Could I technically date somebody who smokes?

Probably.

Could I build a life with somebody who expects to smoke inside his house… or mine?

Absolutely not.

Pets can be another compatibility issue for some people.

Maybe having animals in the home is non-negotiable for one person and something the other person simply cannot or will not live with.

Nobody needs to be wrong.

But pretending that will magically stop mattering because you really like each other would be a terrible plan.

The label matters less than understanding that there are realities you cannot reasonably negotiate your way around.

Stop Writing Standards Designed Around the Last Man

I have done this.

And I think a lot of us have.

After a painful relationship ends, it is very tempting to build your entire new dating philosophy around preventing that exact man from happening again.

He was emotionally distant?

New rule:

I need someone extremely expressive.

He worked too much?

New rule:

I will never date another man with a demanding career.

He didn’t want to get married?

New rule:

Marriage is now mandatory.

The problem is that avoiding the exact opposite characteristics of one ex is not the same thing as understanding what creates a good partnership for you.

Sometimes relationships teach us something more complicated.

I once dated someone who was very clear that the traditional progression of deeply combining lives was not what he envisioned for himself.

At the time, that seemed very incompatible with what I thought I wanted.

I imagined eventually marrying someone again.

Sharing a home.

Having a partner deeply integrated into my family life.

And for a while I continued exploring that relationship knowing that our visions did not completely match.

Ultimately, that incompatibility mattered.

But something interesting happened afterward.

I realized he had introduced me to a relationship structure I had never seriously considered before.

And once I continued dating, I met men who were much more enthusiastic about marriage, moving in together and deeply combining lives.

Exactly what I thought I wanted.

Except now that I was actually being offered it, I wasn’t so sure.

Having people in my space changed how I thought about my space.

Building a life I genuinely enjoyed changed how eager I was to merge it with somebody else’s.

What I once saw as an obvious next step started to feel less obvious.

That does not mean the first relationship suddenly became right for me.

It means I learned something about myself.

And this is why I don’t think you should treat your dating standards like constitutional law.

You are allowed to learn.

You are allowed to change.

You are allowed to discover that something you thought was mandatory actually isn’t.

And you are allowed to discover that something you barely considered before is incredibly important.

The goal is not to defend the list.

The goal is to understand yourself.

Ask What the Trait Actually Creates in Your Life

One of the easiest ways to make your list more useful is to stop at every requirement and ask:

Why?

You want an ambitious man.

Why?

What does ambition actually represent to you?

Maybe what you really need is someone who is financially responsible.

Maybe you value growth.

Maybe you want somebody independent and reliable.

Maybe discipline is incredibly attractive to you and ambition is simply how you have been describing it.

Same thing with communication.

You might say:

He has to text me every morning.

Okay.

Why?

Maybe what you actually need is consistency.

Reassurance.

Intentional communication.

Predictable connection.

Maybe the morning text itself is not the standard at all.

It is just one behaviour that represents the thing you actually care about.

Get underneath the surface requirement.

Because if you don’t understand why something matters, you can very easily reject someone who could meet the actual need simply because he does it differently than you imagined.

This is very close to the distinction made in Gottman Institute dating guidance between actual needs and preferences: protecting core values and needs matters, while preferences usually deserve more flexibility. (The Gottman Institute)

Build Your Standards Around Your Actual Life

This is especially important for divorced moms and single moms.

You are not creating a relationship inside a vacuum.

You already have a life.

Kids.

Parenting responsibilities.

Work.

Finances.

Friends.

A home.

A schedule.

Maybe a co-parenting situation.

Maybe a strong need for independence.

Maybe very little desire to blend families.

Maybe a lot.

So you need to think about:

Parenting.

Custody.

Independence.

Personal space.

The level of family integration you actually want.

Your social life.

Career.

Finances.

Faith.

Long-term living arrangements.

And whatever else fundamentally shapes how you live.

You cannot choose a relationship model simply because society tells you what the next step is supposed to be.

Date.

Become exclusive.

Move in.

Get married.

Blend everything.

Why?

Maybe you want that.

Great.

But maybe you don’t.

The important part is knowing which life you are actually trying to build.

Because the last thing you want is to meet someone, have incredible chemistry, get emotionally invested and only later realize that the two of you fundamentally want different lives.

You need to know what you are looking for not only in the man, but in the life you would build with or alongside him.

That second part may actually matter more.

Keep the List Short Enough to Use It

I do not want you leaving this article and building a 47-point dating audit that every man must pass before dessert.

That defeats the purpose.

You need enough structure to guide your decisions.

Not enough structure to turn dating into a compliance department.

For TMIC purposes, I like a starting framework that looks something like this:

Four to six non-negotiable character standards.

Not because four to six is some magical number backed by the International Board of Dating Standards.

It isn’t.

It is simply short enough that you can remember and actually use the list.

These are the behaviours and character traits that fundamentally determine whether someone gets access to your life.

Three to five core compatibility requirements.

Again: decision tool, not science.

These are the major lifestyle or relationship realities that need to align well enough for a partnership to work.

A very short list of actual deal breakers.

And I mean actual deal breakers.

If they repeatedly appear and the deal remains intact, maybe they need to be reclassified.

Then:

Preferences.

Have as many as you want.

You are allowed to like tall men.

Funny men.

Men who travel.

Someone with good style.

You are allowed to have taste.

You simply need to understand that preferences usually deserve flexibility.

And please do not eliminate an otherwise fantastic man because you dislike his shoes.

I have met a few men whose fashion sense was not exactly where I would have liked it to be.

Fortunately, fashion is one of the more fixable problems humanity has produced.

If he wants help, there are jackets available.

Use Your Standards While You Still Like Him

Anyone can write an incredible standards list while single.

It is also extremely easy after a breakup to pull the list back out and explain why the relationship obviously never should have happened.

Where your standards actually become useful is when you really like somebody.

That is the test.

Chemistry arrives.

He’s funny.

You’re attracted to him.

You can’t stop thinking about him.

You start looking forward to the text.

You have an amazing date.

Suddenly that thing you swore mattered starts looking extremely negotiable.

And that tendency is not particularly shocking. Dating research has found that stated requirements do not always hold up neatly once there is an actual person standing in front of us. (The Gottman Institute)

Your standards are not supposed to describe your ideal man.

They are supposed to help you make decisions when your feelings make it harder to think clearly.

This is especially important when it comes to the bigger compatibility questions.

What kind of relationship does he actually want?

How does he parent?

What role does religion play in his life?

How much time does he realistically have available?

Does he want to merge lives eventually?

Does he want marriage?

Where does he want to live?

Those conversations may not be particularly sexy.

But neither is falling deeply for someone and discovering six months later that the relationship you want does not exist inside the life he wants.

Your List Is Allowed to Change

Do not write your standards once, put them in the Notes app and consult them like they were delivered on stone tablets.

Revisit them.

Dating gives you information.

Relationships give you information.

Heartbreak gives you information.

Sometimes a man shows you that something you thought was incredibly important is actually negotiable.

Sometimes a relationship teaches you that something you barely thought about matters much more than you realized.

Update the list.

The point is not to become more rigid every time somebody hurts you.

The point is to become more accurate.

More self-aware.

More intentional about who fits into your life.

Standards are not supposed to help you manufacture the perfect man.

They are supposed to help you recognize whether the actual man standing in front of you belongs in your life.

And if you understand both the character of the person you want and the life you actually want to live, you have a much better chance of recognizing the difference between someone worth exploring further and someone who was probably never going to fit, no matter how good the chemistry felt.

If you’re trying to date with standards without turning every first date into a performance review, join the TMIC Pep Talk. We’re figuring out how to make better dating decisions without pretending chemistry isn’t still going to complicate the hell out of them.

XOXO,

That Mama