Standards and their discontents
The phrase “lowering standards” in regards to dating has always rubbed me the wrong way. It sounds insulting to everyone involved: to yourself for needing to admit that you’re not “good enough” for the people you aspire to be with, and to those for whom you now must “settle” because that means they are also not “good enough” for people “better” than you. No one likes the implications of “lowering standards,” no matter which side of the equation they're on.
(Were those enough scare quotes for you? I have more!)
It sounds unnecessarily harsh to me, but I think the underlying reason I don’t like it is that it’s not actually about raising or lowering anything: it’s about recalibrating.
Recalibrating, not lowering
Lana Li writes prolifically about her experiences in the NYC dating scene, and she offers a lot of great insights about the lessons she’s learned and how she’s applied them to her own life to better her chances of getting good matches and having enjoyable, repeat dates with guys she really likes. A recent piece of advice she offered was spot-on and actually illustrates very well the difference between “lowering” standards and recalibrating them.
I want to expand on these ideas.
To women, Lana suggests:
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a man with a PhD, but if what you really want is someone who can challenge you intellectually and you’re having trouble finding enough phds, try filtering by asking better screening questions to suss this out.
What she’s getting at here is that your requirement for a PhD might not really be about the official document confirming that he conducted a certain amount of original research and then successfully defended his dissertation; it might just be the best way you can think of right now to filter for who you really want to meet, which are thoughtful men who challenge you intellectually, and that perhaps different filters would show more of these men.
She gives a similar example for men and some of their potentially misguided expectations:
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a woman with a low body count, but if what you actually want is a woman without STDs who won’t cheat, focus on women who want monogamy and get tested + ask questions about how past relationships ended when the time is appropriate. Look more for indicators of integrity and honesty in other parts of her life.
Again, a more thoughtful substitute for a nearly impossible filter that’s as unlikely for men to find as it is for women to locate men who match their statistically impossible height and income preferences. A filter whose results may not tell the whole story, or which might not even get you what you’re really looking for in the first place. Like Lana summarizes,
The issue with both is that we develop filtering criteria that may not align with what actually makes us happy in a relationship - we also often confuse symbols for the thing it’s symbolizing.
Emphasis mine.
How much do looks really matter?
Appearance seems to be the trickiest one because, generally speaking, what we’re attracted to physically seems to be more innate than anything else, but aesthetic preferences, too, can be recalibrated with some success. To go back to this insufferable topic once more, consider women’s stated preference for men's height. Is it really a narrowly specific (and quite rare) combination of centimeters or feet and inches you’re after? Or is it a certain way you want to feel, physically, around the guy when you’re together? Because if you’re a woman of short or average height, most men will already be taller than you (even in heels), and if you want to feel smaller or daintier or otherwise like a smol bean next your dude, then perhaps you don’t actually need, or even want, a man who is literally 6’3”. Maybe more importantly, I feel like the women who insist on very tall men are also picturing a very specific body type attached to that height that isn’t even necessarily “tall” at all.
Be honest: are you as likely to be as attracted to a tall, thinner guy as you are to a tall man with visible gym muscles and some bulk to his frame? I don’t think that height is actually so important that any woman with such a requirement would select a tall, thin man over an athletic or bulkier guy who is average height, especially if she isn’t so thin, herself. Why? Because the symbol (the specific height requirement) did not match the desire (a big dude who makes you feel small and protected) hiding behind it. Perhaps a man who is 5’9” with a stocky frame and noticeable muscles who can throw you over his shoulder without effort would actually fulfill that desire just the same, or better.
Once we move from charts and graphs and YouTube rants and check in on how real life is going, someone’s “value” on the “sexual marketplace” feels less like a linear number and more like a unique 3D shape made up of personality, values, and physical traits. You don’t go from “PhD holder” down to “middle class HVAC repairman who reads Sartre on his lunch breaks.” The first is only a status marker, while the second are qualities that make up the person. Someone who both has those qualities and also a PhD are statistically rare, so you need to recalibrate in order to get what you want.
Recalibrating one’s standards isn’t just about figuring out what we want from a potential mate, though; it’s also about understanding who we are to everyone else.
Avoiding falling into adolescent habits of attraction
The tendency of people to chase after potential mates who will probably never reciprocate their feelings is how we dated (or, subsequently, didn’t) as teenagers. I spent a good chunk of the latter part of middle school plus most of high school obsessed with a certain Type of Guy, just like everyone else in my cohort of teenage girls: handsome, blonde, popular jocks. The kind that resembled the most common of handsome teenage movie stars. I picked one to obsess over in particular, the crush was never reciprocated, and he was actually kind of mean about it in the early days because I acted like an obsessive weirdo to him.
Anyway, the point is, don’t do this anymore. Ask yourself: do you know what you’re looking for, and why? Do you have any evidence that these people would ever be into you? How many repeated rejections by the same Type of Person will you endure before you allow yourself to look elsewhere?
Plenty of people have discussed the current problem of women’s standards being too high and, to a lesser extent, men’s as well. One way in which this can manifest in women is that she wants the Tall Handsome Finance Guy archetype while she, herself is the embodiment of the Cookie Monster PJ Pants with Tangled Plastic Amazon Hair Extensions and a Groupon Spray Tan archetype. You can see the male version of this play out with the kinds of men who call objectively hot celebrities “mid” or fat between WoW sessions while having questionable hygiene habits and a hundred extra pounds around their waists.
What’s your (arche)type?
I’ve discussed this before, but one thing that’s both important and so often overlooked is not just figuring out who your type is, but figuring out whose type you are. Who do you tend to attract? Who falls all over you when you walk into a room, who tends to give you the most sincere compliments, who shows the most immediate interest? More importantly, are those the same people who you tend to become attracted to, yourself? If not, how’s that been going for you?
I think it's been long enough now that I can say with some irony that I was somewhat lucky in how I was brutally rejected so often early on because I learned a lot about who fit into which Boy-Box and why. Being almost certainly not-autistic while also obsessed to an autistic degree with categorizing things and people probably helped. I think about this post a lot when I think about “types” because it seems to validate my experiences so well. Dmitry says:
She understands her attractiveness isn't universal, but to a certain type-of-guy she's his 10.
You need to be looking for that certain type-of-guy, or certain type-of-girl, find out where they hang out, and go reassess your options. There are people of all hotness and financial and educational and personality categories contained within those groups of certain types-of-people you are most likely to attract. This is not lowering expectations, but calibrating them properly.
When I was about 12 and in my hideously gawky and accidentally-androgynous phase, I was hanging out with some neighbor friends whose similarly-aged male cousins were visiting, and one of the boys became almost comically obsessed with me for the two or three hours we were there. He told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, which was such an unusual thing to hear back then that I thought he was joking. I never saw him again after that and I don’t even remember his name, but his words and unprecedented doe-eyed attention stuck with me.
As it turns out, I’m that guy’s type. I just had to figure out the essence of that guy, what qualities that guy had that made him notice certain things about me that he liked, and see who else was like that. And I learned these things because that guy was rare enough back then that I could pattern-match until it became easy enough to predict who, at the very least, wasn’t that guy. Of course, I’ve been wrong before and I’ve both overplayed and underplayed my hand, but most of the time, I’ve been pretty correct about who will and will not be into me.
For example, I am not these guys’ type:
Extremely Handsome Sports Guy: This guy will literally never even know I exist unless forcibly introduced to me by someone else. I am completely invisible to this guy. If someone made us to go on a date together, we would bore each other senseless. I am not outwardly feminine enough for him, I am simply too much of an earnest nerd relative to his carefully laid-back, cool persona, and I am unable to pretend to have fun at professional sporting events, which he is required to attend regularly with a female accessory.
These guys come in different flavors, but mostly they are usually the exact 6’3” guys who end up in finance later simply because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves or their family’s money or the MBA they got because they didn’t have any other discernable interests.
Gym Bro: This is a sub-type of Extremely Handsome Sports Guy in that he is stereotypically attractive (albeit in a different way), single-minded, and typically goes for women who wear dresses and want babies or who, at the very least, wear coordinated, sexy outfits to the gym and not whatever pajamas she woke up in that day. I am, again, completely invisible to this Type of Guy.
I add this category mostly because I have literally never in my entire life been hit on at the gym. Any gym, in any state, during any year, since I started going to them in 2002.
Ever.
Very Serious Academic: I annoy the s**t out of these men. I am not serious enough, I occasionally engage in pop culture and know who Morgan Wallen is, I am a bit too over the top emotionally for them and I am probably not ambitious enough. This Type of Guy reliably accidentally falls for me, anyway, because he will mistake me for One of Them at a party after I impress him by knowing what the Large Hadron Collider is or something, which is more than he can say for everyone else he’s spoken to tonight, at this party his roommate dragged him to that I’ll never be able to get him to go to again, the whole evening setting miserably unrealistic expectations for both of us as we mutually trick ourselves into a relationship.
These could also be Very Serious Artists. The point is that they are Very Serious, and I am not. They are big snobs, and I cannot maintain serious snobbery for long without arguing myself out of it. They are disciplined, and I am impulsive and impatient. I am also not dumb, so they tend to like me if they meet me under the right circumstances where my other Very Annoying Qualities are not on display, but they inevitably become exasperated with me, as though I am their annoying little sister who they have unfortunately grown too fond of to leave but must still criticize at every opportunity in the name of trying to help me Be Better.
Middle-Manager Griller: Similar in basicness to Extremely Handsome Sports Guy, but not born rich, so his pickiness level is more pragmatic in that he likes traditional femininity and expects some kids, but doesn’t expect as much in the way of accoutrements from a woman. He maybe noticed me once or twice but writes me off as being too much of an over-educated cat lady libtard to deal with interpersonally beyond perhaps a good-natured chat at events we both attend. We have nothing in common and both politely understand this and we’re not mad about it. We wish each other the best.
This is basically the country version of the rich finance guy. He might even be country-rich, meaning his wealth is self-made from quietly owning a successful farm supply store that he inherited from his dad, or operating his own small plumbing company that he started in his parents’ garage at seventeen, but he’s humble about it. Most likely Type of Guy to actually rescue the Dunkin barista because he’s the only type to actually appreciate the kind of simple femininity that just wants to be taken care of even when she’s bratty and doesn’t know why.
Anyway, I have learned not to go after those men (well, usually; there are exceptions to every rule). After all that rejection, I wanted to stop being attracted to guys who would never reciprocate my feelings, so I just eventually started writing them off as “not an option” for so long that it worked. That, to me, doesn’t feel like “lowering” my standards, either; it feels pragmatic, and in fact it was almost magical how well it worked.
There will always be exceptions, like I said, and maybe you actually want to go after one of these guys whose type you have determined you are decidedly not — yet, anyway. What then?
The exceptions
Chris — the man I chased desperately with varying success for three years — most closely resembled Extremely Handsome Sports Guy in attitude, appearance, and behavior. If it weren't for his curiosity and intelligence (and probably glasses) signaling to me that he was not fully That Guy but just played one at parties, I might not have even tried opening myself up to that kind of potential rejection.
So, what worked?
It was easy: all I had to do was completely reinvent my entire personality to suit his.
I'm mostly joking, but what I mean is that I actually had to try harder. I had to actually look at myself, my behaviors, my affectations, and everything about me that had gone uninvestigated for the simple fact that it hadn’t yet needed investigating. It wasn't so easy when I wasn't selecting from the pool of guys who I knew would likely respond well to me naturally, who either didn’t mind or easily tolerated the behaviors that repelled Guys Like Chris. What did that mean for me and Chris?
Chris had a thing about “games.” He said he hated them, never wanted to play them, was turned off by them, etc. I brushed this off as paranoia on his part because I didn’t think I played any games. I was pretty transparent about everything — who I was, what I believed in, how I felt about him and our relationship, or my hopes for one. But it turned out there were “games” I played that I didn’t see as games at the time — just little things I’d overlooked in my relationships with other men in the past either because we were both young and playing the same games and thought it was normal, or because the guys in the past would — did, apparently — simply let it slide when I’d engage in them rather than confront me about it, allowing me to bask in blissful ignorance thinking I lacked any real problematic or manipulative behavior.
It also meant that I had to turn it down a notch. This wasn’t the Type of Guy who would get excited about how much I liked him — he was the type to get scared of such heavy-handed affection being thrown his way too early. To him, such a thing seemed almost careless rather than romantic or flattering. So, after the first time I displayed some overzealous and contextually irrational jealousy, leading to freaking him out and him calling a break, I quickly recalibrated and ensured that if I were to feel that way again, I would deescalate my own emotions using methods I already knew worked rather than getting brandy-drunk at his family’s cabin and whining about some other girl he had been with before.
Anyway, Daniel, who I was with between the ages of 19 - 21, was also a Type of Guy who wouldn’t (shouldn’t) otherwise be into me: the Very Serious Academic/Artist. He had initially written me off, too, for the same reasons I had already assumed he wouldn’t like me, but we had one of those moments that made him think there was more compatibility and maturity there (I mean, I do have my moments). When we first started dating, he was literally warned about me by some of our coworkers who told him I was too young for him and too much of a “party girl” and that we wouldn’t be compatible. As it turns out, they were mostly right, but it took two nearly-blissful years to amicably figure that out, even if I did f**k it up the whole way.
Daniel unwittingly gave me the primer on how to behave around Chris nearly ten years later — respectfully and considerately, in ways I didn’t realize (or previously accept) really could be so deeply gendered. Frankly, it could probably all be boiled down to maturity, a quality most of us don’t yet possess in our late teens and twenties, and one that some people never manage to acquire.
Whose standards?
It’s also worth examining how many of your filters and requirements are genuinely even yours to begin with. Perhaps they were absorbed by those of your friends and you don’t want to lose their favor; perhaps teen magazines told you that the only attractive male body type was Brad Pitt in Fight Club, so you’ve convinced yourself that’s all you can get tingly about even though you only dated the one guy who actually looked like that and you had nothing to talk about and he cheated on you with someone so wildly different from you that you had to wonder why he even bothered with you in the first place. Or perhaps you’re a white guy who’s been obsessed with petite Asian girls since one broke your heart in 2009, so you convince yourself you can never date a different Type of Girl ever again because you need her back, in some form or another. The only Type of Girl who turns your head now is the Petite Asian Girl, and you must get her, no matter how few of them are interested in you. Why isn’t this working? You ask. Am I destined to be single forever?
The latter Type of Guy is one I’ve known a lot of, for some reason or another, since all the way back in high school even if Petite Asian Girl actually manifested as BPD Art Ho or Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Unattainable Statuesque Redheaded Model or Poly Girl Who’s Also Dating Your Friend, or whatever (god there are so many more Types I want to call out here), and the happy ones finally got over their long-ago ex or unreciprocated crush and found and married women who share their values and interests and general background and who are pretty and sweet, finally deviating from what they thought was their “type” and realizing that there was a whole world out there full of women who were more than interested in them and what they had to offer once they took the blinders off. Would you call that “settling”? How about “lowering” his standards? In my mind, knowing those guys, I don’t look at any of their girlfriends or wives and think they lowered anything; I see them as finally having made sense of what they wanted from a woman and removing the symbols of those things from their requirements and refocusing on those desires on their own.
Ultimately, you don’t need to lower your standards; you just need to calibrate them with reality in mind. Not the reality that you don’t deserve “more” or whatever, but the reality that your symbols and filters may not match your actual desires, or theirs. What can you recalibrate without feeling like you’re “settling”? I bet you can find something.
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