Everyone Told Me to Lower My Standards. I Did the Opposite.

When I turned 33 and was still single, I started getting the talk. You know the one. The "maybe you're being too picky" talk.

It came from my mom. From two of my friends. From a coworker who I'm pretty sure was hitting on me. Even from my barber once, which was a wild thing to navigate while he had a razor near my throat.

Everyone had a theory about why I was single. The theories all rhymed. Lower the bar. Be more open. Stop holding out for some perfect woman.

I tried that for a year. It was a disaster. Then I did the opposite and my life changed.

The lower-the-bar year

I went on a lot of dates that year. I said yes to almost every match. I gave people the benefit of the doubt even when I was getting little signals that we weren't compatible. I told myself I was being open-minded.

What actually happened: I wasted enormous amounts of time on people I knew within the first 20 minutes weren't right for me. I had two short-lived relationships that should never have started. I ended up more cynical, not less.

The advice to lower your standards is one of those things that sounds humble but is actually terrible. It assumes the problem is that you have standards. The problem is almost never standards. It's something else.

What standards actually are

There's a confusion at the heart of all this. People conflate two different things and call them both "standards."

The first thing is preferences. "She has to be 5'8" or taller." "She has to make six figures." "She has to love hiking." These are not standards. These are filters. Some are reasonable, most are arbitrary, and clinging to them too hard will leave you alone forever.

The second thing is values. "She has to be honest." "She has to be kind to service workers." "She has to actually want a relationship and not be using me to feel better about her ex." These are real standards. These are not negotiable. The advice to lower your standards never specifies which kind it means and people end up lowering the wrong ones.

When I raised the right standards

After my year of lowering everything, I made a list. Two columns. "Preferences I can drop" and "Things that aren't negotiable."

The preferences column was long. Height, income, specific hobbies, even age range got more flexible. I let go of a lot of stuff that turned out to be cosmetic.

The non-negotiables column was short. About six things. Honesty. Kindness. Wants the same kind of relationship I want. Not in active addiction. Has done some self-work. Doesn't talk about her ex more than once a date.

Once I had that list, I started enforcing it. Hard. The first hint that someone was going to violate one of those six? I'd politely end it. No second date. No "give it a chance." No agonizing.

And here's the thing nobody told me. The dating pool got bigger, not smaller. Because I'd dropped a lot of the cosmetic preferences. So I had more matches I'd actually consider. But I was also wasting way less time, because the second any of the deal-breakers showed up, I was out.

The platform shift

Around the same time I started enforcing standards, I also started thinking about where I was looking for these people. The swipe apps are designed to make you feel like there's a hot person two swipes away who's better than the one in front of you. That mindset is incompatible with actually committing to anyone.

DatingAbove doesn't work that way. It's a curated platform where the assumption is that people are there to actually meet someone, not to swipe forever. That changed how I approached every conversation. I stopped treating people as disposable and they returned the favor.

The reframe

If you're getting the lower-the-bar talk from people in your life, here's what to do. Make the two columns. Be honest with yourself about which preferences are actually deal-breakers and which are just stuff you've gotten attached to. Then enforce the deal-breakers ruthlessly and let the preferences flex.

You're not being picky. You're being clear. There's a difference, and the difference is the entire game.

I met my current partner six months after I made the list. She was a foot shorter than my old preference and made way less money than I would have specified. She also met every single one of my non-negotiables. We've been together two years.

Lower your preferences. Raise your standards. The advice is in the words.