Setting Real Standards Before You Start Swiping

Most men have never written down what they are looking for. They know it when they see it, which in practice means they like whoever looks best in the first photo and work the rest out later. The usual result is three weeks of texting somebody they were never actually interested in.

The cost is not abstract and it is not moral. It is time and attention, and both of them are finite.

Every like you did not really mean can turn into a message sitting there needing an answer. The ones you half meant get the replies you half wrote, and the woman on the other end reads that as who you are. Meanwhile the two or three you genuinely cared about are sitting in the same list, getting the same half attention as everybody else.

There is a second cost that is easier to miss. When you say yes to almost everyone, you stop knowing what you want, because you never had to decide. A list built with no filter tells you nothing about yourself, so the next round is just as vague as the last one.

This is where most attempts at this go wrong, so it is worth separating clearly.

A requirement list is a set of numbers and rules: a height, an age range, no kids, must like dogs. That is a filter, and filters are useful for the two or three things that genuinely matter to you. But a long list of them is not standards. It is a way of feeling selective without having thought about anything.

Standards are about what you want an actual evening to be like. Who you want to be sitting across from, what you want to be talking about, and what you want it to go on to become. Those are answerable questions and they do not look like a spreadsheet.

Twenty minutes with a pen, once, and you will not need to do it again for a month.

What am I here for, honestly. Not the respectable answer. If it is something serious, write that down. If it is dating a few people for a while with nothing decided, write that down instead. Faking the other one wastes her time and yours.

What do I need in a person to enjoy a whole evening with them. Curiosity, a sense of humor that survives a bad meal, an actual job she cares about, the ability to argue without it getting cold. Pick the three that are real for you.

What have I put up with before that I am not doing again. This is the most useful of the three, because it is the only one drawn from evidence rather than imagination. Everybody has a short list here and almost nobody has written it down.

Three lines in your notes app. That is it, and the point of writing it is not ceremony.

An unwritten standard does not survive contact with a good lead photo. You will talk yourself past it in under a second, every time, and you will not notice you did it. A written one you can actually check yourself against, which is the only reason to bother.

Keep it short enough that you remember it without looking. If your list needs a scroll, it is a fantasy, not a standard.

The immediate, practical payoff is not fewer bad conversations. It is better opening messages.

When you know why you liked somebody, the first line is already written. You liked her because of the thing she said about her city, or the trip in the third photo, or the job that sounded genuinely interesting. That is what you write to her about. It is specific because the reason was specific.

When you liked her for no reason you can name, there is nothing to open on, so you fall back on a line that would suit anybody. That is where the generic opener actually comes from. It is not a writing problem, it is a decision problem happening three days earlier.

A standard you cannot check against what she actually put up is not doing any work.

“Ambitious” is not visible. “Good energy” is not visible. “Emotionally intelligent” is definitely not visible, and any man who says he can spot it from four photos is guessing. These are not wrong things to want, they are just not usable at the moment of the decision.

Turn each one into something you can actually see or read. Instead of ambitious, look for somebody who described what she does in a way that suggests she cares about it. Instead of good energy, look for one line that has an actual opinion in it. The want stays the same. The test becomes something you can apply in two seconds.

The reasonable fear is that being selective leaves you with nobody. It is worth answering honestly rather than dismissing.

Be strict about the small number of things that decide whether an evening is good, and relaxed about everything else. Most men have it exactly backwards: rigid about height, age, and job, loose about whether they would actually enjoy talking to her.

The test is straightforward. Apply your standards for a week. If almost nobody passes, you did not write standards, you wrote a wish. Cut it to the three things you would genuinely not compromise on and let the rest go.

Standards written from imagination are a first draft. The useful version comes from evidence.

After a month, look at who you actually enjoyed meeting and who you were relieved to stop talking to, then compare that against your three lines. Usually one line turns out to have been something you thought you should want, and one thing you left off turns out to matter a great deal.

Rewrite it then, from what actually happened. That version will be shorter, more specific, and much harder to talk yourself out of at the moment you need it.