The first time someone told me my standards were too high, I laughed. I thought he was talking about my drink order. We were at a dive bar on Knickerbocker Avenue in the heart of Bushwick — the kind of place that serves beers and a handful of low-lift mixed drinks. I had the audacity to ask for a Negroni.
But that’s not what he meant. I just finished telling him about a date I went on recently and how she made a weird comment that irked me. It was so minor that I can’t even remember what it was. But regardless, that was enough to write her off.
I did it partially because I’ve been on the receiving end of petty rejection when otherwise everything was awesome. At this point, I am afraid of putting myself out there if I’m not 100 percent sure. I’ve been hurt so many times, do I want to bother if I’m not gaga?
My friend — leaned across the dimly lit, beer-slathered table and shouted so I could hear him over the loud early 90s grunge music playing overhead “Dude, your standards are too high. That’s why you’re single.”
This friend is married, by the way, to someone genuinely incredible. The kind of marriage you begrudgingly admire because it seems both fun and functional. So when he says I’m being too picky, I want to roll my eyes, but I also have to admit he might have a point.
He’s known me for like half my life. Frankly, if anyone is qualified to give me good dating advice it’s probably him.
I shrugged, pretended not to care, but the words burrowed into me. Too high? What’s that supposed to mean?
As if I was overreaching, demanding more than I deserved. I wanted to argue with him— I wasn’t asking for perfection, just for something that felt right. But I let it go. We ordered another round, and the conversation shifted to another topic. Hours later as I made my way home, I carried his words with me like an unwanted souvenir.
Then not long ago, Vox ran an article titled “The problem with dating? Your standards might be too high.” It was a headline designed to provoke—bait for people like me who read about dating culture religiously. I clicked, of course. The piece made good points about how we search for love now, how it has become both a game and a grind. But I found myself stuck on one particular claim; that our standards, as daters, are simply too high.
What struck me was how the phrase itself—lower your standards—lands like an insult. It implies that the problem isn’t the system, or the culture, or the way dating has been redesigned by apps and algorithms. The problem, supposedly, is you. That you’re unworthy of the kind of partner you want. That to avoid loneliness, you should settle.
I don’t think that framing is fair or gets to the root of the problem. For me, there’s a big difference between high standards and unrealistic expectations.
The two often get confused. High standards are things like “I want someone who has their life together, treats me with respect, doesn’t gaslight me, and makes me feel safe and cared for.” Those are reasonable, honestly that should be expected.
Unrealistic expectations, on the other hand, are all of that plus an impossible demand for perfection. “I want someone with no flaws, no quirks, and no complications. The things that make us human.”
Obviously that distinction gets lost in the modern dating narrative. It's understandably emotionally driven. Hard to put into words. But you turn to someone who does know how. And they give advice. It frames it as if we are the problem—too picky, too demanding, too unwilling to compromise. That’s ridiculous, why be with someone I don’t like just so I’m not alone?
And sure, on some level, we all contribute to the problem. We are all the victims and villains in this story. But at the same time, we’re also operating within a system that has gamified love, and culturally, we’re now living with the fallout.
Chances are my story is also yours. It is for most of us that are single right now and looking for the real thing. We’re caught between being victims of industries that gamified our desire for love and being participants who perpetuate the cycle ourselves because honestly at this point, we don’t know anything different. It’s just the way it is.
You know the cycle.
You've just been on a bad streak of dates. You take a break from dating—a few months off, enough time to focus on work, family, friends, the neglected stack of books on your nightstand. You feel good again, even steady. And then, inevitably, you decide to return. You redownload the apps. You go to mixers. A friend introduces you to someone at a bar.
It starts.
You go on a date. It’s great. The person checks most of your boxes. You laugh, you connect, you feel good. But then comes the laugh—that little snort at the end. Endearing in theory, but in practice, you imagine yourself hearing it for decades and suddenly it’s too much. It’s a little weird but you think, I like them, but maybe I can find someone without that laugh. Later, you send the text: “Hey, I had a good time but I don’t think this was the right fit.”
Another date. Same thing. They meet your non-negotiables. You enjoy yourself. But one moment you look down at the bar. You catch a glance of their thumb and it looks a little odd to you and you can’t unsee it. It’s not a big deal but your mind says otherwise. Again, you think, Maybe the next person won’t have this ‘flaw’. Again, you send the text. “Hey, I had a good time but I don’t think this was the right fit.”
Number deleted and onto the next.
Then comes a third date. This one blows you away. You feel giddy, you call a friend, you tell them you may have found your person. You imagine futures, trips, small domestic rituals. And then the next morning, you get the text: “Hey, I had a good time but I don’t think this was the right fit. Good luck out there.”
Suddenly, you’re on the receiving end. You’re baffled and your trust feels a bit violated. You thought this time was different but it wasn’t, you’re just the one on the other side.
That’s the loop. The false promise of endless options. The idea that perfection is just one swipe away. The constant auditioning. And the knowledge that you’re just as guilty as the people you complain about.
Fast forward. You’ve now been on four first dates. You’ve learned a thing or two. Then comes someone new—great connection, sparks flying, and soon you’re swept into a second, third, fourth date. You’re convinced. But blinded by raw attraction, you miss the red flags and in hindsight they were so obvious. After all, red flags just look like flags when you’re wearing rose colored glasses (I heard that line in Bojack Horseman recently, I can’t take credit but boy is that one on the nose) By week four or five, they’re undeniable, and you cut it off. Back to square one. Now your guard is up.
You wait a week or two. You decide to go on another date. This person is awesome —checks off so many of your boxes. The non-negotiables aren’t an issue. But the problem is you feel no spark and you just wasted a month on someone who wasn’t a good fit to put it lightly, albeit this is for different reasons, but why would you want to waste your time if you’re not feeling the wow factor? You cut it off.
Deep down, you know that if you’d given it two, three, or four more dates, it could have grown into something real. But we’ve been conditioned by the social media landscape and dating apps to crave that instant dopamine hit — a preference for the thrill of an Instagram like as opposed to longevity that lies in the offline nuance. Slow burns, the kind of connection real relationships are built on, feel like a risk we don’t want to take. After all, isn’t there always someone better right around the corner?
You are convinced there’s always something better, even when there isn’t — when the right fit may be sitting right next to you right now, with maybe a vodka and soda in hand sipping it through a straw as they glare deeply at you. But alas it’s onto the next.
Then you meet someone else. The chemistry is electric. One of the best first dates you’ve been on in like a decade. You plan a second date on the way out. You text them to set up the details and then never hear from them again. You feel violated. You know that a ghoster is bad news and you dodged a bullet but you still feel used.
Then you finally meet someone.
You click. It feels good, and for the first time in a while, you can actually see a future with them. A couple of months go by—you’re still dating a few other people, because nothing’s exclusive yet, and you want to be sure before committing.
Eventually, you have the talk. The exclusivity talk. And they say yes—yes, they want to be exclusive. Just not with you. They’ve been seeing other people too, and after weighing their options, they chose someone else.
It stings. It’s disappointing. But you understand. You don’t like it, but you get it. After all, you were kind of doing the same thing. You wait a week but you’re cool with trying again.
So you do. Another date. And this time, the red flags are obvious—practically gift-wrapped. You’re almost grateful for it because it’s all out there. You don’t have to waste your time. You finish your drink, leave, and call a friend to vent about how the dating pool “sucks.”
But if you’re honest, out of seven people, five might have been genuinely good matches. You just didn’t want to give anyone a chance unless they felt like 100 percent perfection and vice versa. That’s the trap of unrealistic expectations — and that’s not a “standards” thing.
And so the cycle repeats. You wake up, swipe again, go out and go home and get angrier at dating advice on social media. The people you’re seeking love from, at some level start to feel more as an adversary rather than someone also facing the very same problems that you are. That’s a gut punch.
It becomes almost a ritual of sorts. A bad date is the catalyst for a brunch table where everyone is dissecting “red flags” that could easily be quirks. TikToks that frame disappointment as pathology. It’s friends texting in the group chat dissecting the screenshot of a Hinge message thread.
And you briefly forget that the person you saw a few nights ago— awkwardly sipping their drink, telling a story that doesn’t quite land — is probably just as tired, just as vulnerable, and just as hopeful as you.
The longer this goes on, the more it feels like we’re stuck in an abusive relationship—not with each other, but with the very tools we use to find one another. Even if the apps vanished tomorrow, the damage would linger. We’ve internalized the logic behind it. The search for the flawless, the reflex to discard, the obsession with optimization.
The thing is that it wasn’t always like this. It was easier to meet people and it was easier to connect even with dating apps. People seemed more willing to explore and more willing to see how things would play out if we just let it.
Dating seemed easier when dating apps were novel and exciting and frankly when the business behind it wasn’t a massive publicly traded company but rather an ambitious idea to connect people that otherwise wouldn’t cross paths.
It was exhilarating at first. The sheer abundance, the possibility that a stranger could become a story — our story. The romance novel where we are the main characters. But abundance is a tricky thing. It makes you restless. You start to believe there’s always another option, someone maybe just a little bit better but there really never is and that’s how we got here and at this point is so deeply entrenched.
And yet, I don’t believe this is unsalvageable.
If we can recognize the trap, we can choose to step outside of it. We can drop the framework of perfection and allow people—ourselves included—to just be human.
We need to give ourselves permission to choose people who are flawed, who snort when they laugh, who maybe have a thumb you don’t love in photographs—but who also show up, listen, and care. We need to allow room for humanity, in others and in ourselves.
But shifting this mindset requires collective buy-in—changing not just how we view ourselves, but how we view others. It means rejecting the idea that people are disposable and pushing back against the way social media often normalizes that thinking. We need more think pieces in places like The Atlantic and New York Magazine, and yes, even influencers (loud sigh) should be encouraging their audiences to rethink what healthy dating expectations look like.
In some ways, we’re already moving in that direction. Many people have started pulling away from dating apps, and the companies behind them have noticed—promising to do better. Is it too little, too late? Maybe. But it’s at least a step toward addressing a problem we have, for better or worse, accepted as part of modern life.
My experience isn’t unique. Far from it. In fact, that’s exactly why this story matters. Because most of us have been here or are here now—staring at a phone in the middle of the night, thumbs hovering over an endless stream of faces, wondering why it’s so impossible to meet someone we actually like. Why the sparks that used to feel random and electric now feel like part of a carefully engineered system.
Dating didn’t always feel like this. Once, it was messy, awkward, and human. You met people in coffee shops, at parties, through friends and in my case occasionally on the E train or in Washington Square Park. You asked them out and either it worked or it didn’t. You navigated uncertainty together, learned each other’s rhythms — and hopefully something about yourself along the way. You experienced the thrill of curiosity and the pain of rejection as an intimate, interpersonal thing—not a product feature.
Now, the landscape has changed. In part, this is because someone decided to turn one of the most vulnerable parts of the human experience—looking for love—into a business model. Social media giants and dating app behemoths realized that loneliness could be commodified. That desire could be gamified. That attention, desire, hope, and heartbreak could all be distilled into swipes, likes, and notifications. Every profile, every match, every rejection became part of a carefully optimized system, designed to keep us engaged, scrolling, swiping, and coming back for more. Now it’s widely accepted that it is the most common way to meet someone.
The system works for investors — just not for us, at least not like it used to.
It’s brilliant, really, from a business perspective. And devastating from a human one. Because we didn’t consent to being gamified. We just wanted a connection. We just wanted someone to laugh with, to care for, to wake up beside. And instead, we got metrics, algorithms, dopamine loops, and the persistent whisper that there’s always someone better a swipe away.