I don’t want my neuroses about someone being ‘good enough’ to keep me from finding love. But choosing to be with someone who isn’t quite right seems like a death sentence.

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Dear Hera,

I’m a straight single woman in my late 20s who is dating in a medium-sized European city. The only thing is that I can’t shake the awful feeling that no-one is ever good enough for me. I’ve followed advice to list what I want in a partner, which runs the gamut of “intelligent” to “has a decent job” to “if balding looks OK in a hat,” but it feels like I can never find someone who fulfils all of these briefs in some capacity. If he’s intelligent, it’ll eventually be revealed that he’s mired in debt; if he’s creative, he’ll also have a taste for synthetic drugs; if he’s got a good job, the main hobby he’ll have is posting on Reddit.

I feel ashamed about the feeling that no one can quite measure up to what I want: after all, I have friends who are in loving, long-term relationships with people who would fail my criteria. I’ve also passed on men who I know really liked me, but I felt like they weren’t as ambitious as me or their lifestyles didn’t complement mine. Equally, I’ve dated shiftless men for periods, because I felt that my cohort of artsy liberals would judge me for turning down someone who might just have been fucked by the capitalist system, man! 

As a result, I’ve been very much single for most of my adult life. Sometimes I wish I had a parent or guardian to help me sift through my Hinge matches to tell me if potential suitors are good enough for their little girl. 

The world is so disorientating at the moment, and my anxieties aren’t helped by a strong sense that it could all burn down next week. I don’t want my neuroses about someone being “good enough” to keep me from finding love. But choosing to be with someone who isn’t quite right seems like a death sentence.

Should I throw my list in the bin and give up on my standards?

Yours sincerely, 

Picky & perturbed

Dear Picky,

The problem with picking out a partner as if you’re choosing a piece of Scandinavian furniture for a difficult corner is that you can spend so much time focusing on your wish list that you neglect the most important criteria, which is first and foremost, a deep and genuine connection to another person. 

The thing I noticed most about your letter was the complete lack of emotion. There’s no sense that you’ve ever fallen catastrophically in love. Maybe you’ve never experienced that type of chemistry. Maybe you have, and it all went horribly wrong, and now you’re trying to be a little more discerning. But it does feel to me like you’re going about things in the wrong order.

Nobody likes being spoken about like an inferior brand of wheelbarrow. And yet the way we date seems to increasingly pander to a home shopping network mindset. I’m not saying the traditional method of choosing the most attractive person in your populationally stunted backwater is necessarily a better system. But I do think we’re so overwhelmed with choice that it’s easy to forget what makes romance romantic. 

I’m not saying you should lower your standards because it’s the enlightened or ethical thing to do. It’s genuinely nobody else’s business who you choose to date, and what yardstick you choose to measure them by. Fairness has nothing to do with it. But I do think that your stringent criteria could be preventing you from experiencing one of the best feelings life has to offer.

Perfect people don’t exist, and even if they did, it would be hideous to be in a relationship with one, because to be able to love someone despite their flaws and have them offer you the same grace is a lot more powerful and transformative than trying to find a perfect, lab grown specimen. 

It’s also worth pointing out that people change, and that it’s possible for two people to uplift and transform one another. I’m not suggesting taking on someone as a “fixer-upper.” But things like jobs and debt and hobbies are not permanent states of being. Healthy people get sick. Financially secure people lose their jobs. Everything in life is subject to change, for better and worse, so it makes sense to find someone you’re willing to meet those changes with. 

I don’t think it’s wrong to have a few dealbreakers. But you should save them for the things that really matter to you. Settling doesn’t mean lowering your standards. Sometimes, it means compromising on a few things you thought mattered and getting a whole lot of other extra stuff you didn’t even know you wanted or needed in return. 

It seems to me that all your objections are proof of the fact that you haven’t felt strongly enough about someone to override your initial reservations, and that’s the main issue here, rather than an inherent pickiness. If you can find someone who brings you joy, that’s 75% of the battle. When you meet someone you’re crazy about, the minor stuff that would ordinarily have given you the “ick” is not only irrelevant, but can actually become paradoxically attractive. 

So how do you find someone who gives you that feeling? There is no easy way. But in your case, I wonder if it means starting from a place of curiosity and trying to be more alert to how people make you feel rather than what they bring to the table. It means trusting your heart and gut as well as your intellect. It means trying to date for the spark. With the right person, you can eat a rotisserie chicken beside a dumpster and feel at peace, whereas the wrong person will make a five-course degustation menu feel like a living nightmare. 

I’m not saying it’s easy. But I think you’re so worried about making bad decisions that you’ve stopped paying attention to how you feel, which is surely the whole point.

It’s entirely possible that nobody will ever be good enough for you. On the other hand, nobody is really good enough for anyone, and we should all be grateful for that. Over time, you begin to understand what a privilege it is to be invited into someone’s life, to witness them at their best and worst.  

If you find yourself struggling to make that connection, don’t force it. It’s a thousand times better to be happy and single than to shoehorn yourself into a miserable relationship and eat corned beef in silence until you die.

But if you want the real thing, I suggest setting aside your checklist and paying closer attention to your instincts. You might not get exactly what you thought you wanted, but sometimes, getting exactly what you want isn’t all that satisfying or interesting. Hopefully, you find something deeper and more profound along the way.