The honest guide

Are my dating standards too high? What the research actually says

By Matthew Firth, founder of NexSpark · Aug 9, 2026 · 9 min read

Somebody has told you your standards are too high. Or nobody has, and you have started to wonder on your own, usually around the time a friend says “he was nice though” and you cannot explain why that was not enough.

The research on this is better than the advice. And it points somewhere neither camp expects, because the honest answer is not “lower your standards” and it is not “never settle.” It is that the list you think you want is a poor guide to who you will actually want.

Your stated preferences do not predict your actual attraction

The clearest evidence comes from speed dating, because it lets researchers compare what people say beforehand with what they do in the room.

In a 2008 study, researchers asked 163 people to describe their ideal partner, then ran them through seven speed-dating events with four-minute dates. The conclusion was blunt: “participants' ideal preferences, assessed before the speed-dating event, failed to predict what inspired their actual desire at the event.”

The specific example is the one that stays with you. Someone who had said they valued physical attractiveness highly was not significantly more likely than anyone else to feel chemistry with, or say yes to, the dates they personally found attractive.

A 2014 meta-analysis covering 97 studies pushed it further. Attractiveness predicted romantic interest at a similar strength for both men and women. So did earning prospects. The large, familiar sex differences show up reliably in what people say they want, and largely vanish in what actually moves them.

Machine learning could not do it either

This is my favourite finding on the subject because of how hard the researchers tried.

A 2017 study collected over a hundred self-report measures from speed daters, then used machine learning to predict who would want whom. For predicting whether a specific person would desire a specific other person, the models were essentially useless: knowing everything both people had said about themselves in advance told the researchers effectively nothing about whether those two would click.

The models were not useless at everything. They could predict how much a given person tended to like their dates in general, and how much people tended to like that person in general. What collapsed to nothing was the part that matters: the specific chemistry between these two, which is exactly what a list of preferences is supposed to be for.

So when a dating profile leaves you unmoved and then someone you would never have filtered for turns out to be the one, that is not a personal quirk. It is the most replicated pattern in the field.

More options make you choose worse

Here is where the honest answer stops being reassuring.

Researchers studying 84 speed-dating events found that at larger events, people shifted toward the traits you can assess in seconds, such as height and weight, and away from things like education and occupation. A follow-up in 2011 found something worse: more variety among the people available led to fewer proposals being made overall.

Then there is the finding that will be familiar to anyone who has spent an evening on an app. In a 2020 study of online dating behaviour, participants started rejecting more as they went, producing an average decrease of twenty-seven per cent in the chance of acceptance from the first option shown to the last. The researchers called it a rejection mind-set. For women in the sample, it reduced the number of matches they actually got.

Read that alongside the speed-dating research and the picture resolves. It is not that your standards rose. It is that volume trains you to reject, and rejecting is a habit that builds.

High standards are not the problem. Maximising is.

There is a real distinction in the psychology literature between maximisers, who need to be sure they have found the best available option, and satisficers, who choose something good and stop looking.

The cleanest illustration is not about dating at all. A 2006 study of graduating students found that those with strong maximising tendencies secured jobs with twenty per cent higher starting salaries, and were less satisfied with the jobs they got.

Better outcome. Worse experience of it. That is the maximiser's problem in one line, and it transfers to dating almost intact.

So do high standards actually hurt? It depends, and the research is specific

The most useful study here followed 135 newlywed couples every six months for four years. The 2016 finding was conditional rather than general: high standards improved satisfaction in strong marriages, and in less strong ones, high standards eroded the relationship further.

The author's summary is the sentence I would keep: spouses “appear to be best off to the extent that they ask of their marriages as much as, but not more than, their marriages are able to give them.”

Which means the honest answer to “are my standards too high” is that the question is missing a variable. High standards are excellent when applied to something that can meet them. The skill is not calibrating the number. It is matching the ask to what is actually in front of you.

What is actually going on, in most cases

It also helps to know how few people you are actually competing with. Pew Research surveyed 4,860 American adults and published the results in August 2020. Thirty-one per cent of American adults were single. Half of those were not looking for a relationship or for dates at all, leaving fifteen per cent of all adults single and actively looking. The pool is smaller than the apps make it feel, which is an argument for being deliberate rather than for being less selective.

Note what those numbers are and are not. They describe the size and intent of the pool. They are not people saying their own standards are the problem. I could not find any credible survey measuring that second thing, and if you see one quoted, it is worth checking whether a dating app commissioned it.

One more finding, from six studies covering over 6,500 people: people with higher mate value reported more dealbreakers, not fewer. Selectivity tends to rise with options rather than fall.

Four better questions than “are my standards too high”

Is this a standard or a filter? A standard is about how someone treats you. A filter is a specification. “Repairs things after conflict” is a standard. “Six foot, postgraduate degree, no kids” is a filter, and filters are the part the research says will not predict your actual attraction.

Am I rejecting more than I used to? If you were more open six months ago with the same list, the list is not what changed.

Have I ruled anyone out that I later thought about? That is the maximiser tell, and it is worth taking seriously.

Would I know this from a profile? If what you actually want is warmth, repair after arguments, and the sense that someone is on your side, none of that is legible in advance. It only shows up in a room. That is not a reason to lower the standard. It is a reason to stop trying to detect it from a grid of photographs.

If the dealbreaker list itself is what is bothering you, we wrote separately about intentional dating and about what actually predicts a lasting relationship, which is a shorter list than most people expect.

Frequently asked questions

Are my dating standards too high?

Probably the wrong question. Research following 135 newlywed couples over four years found that high standards improve satisfaction in strong relationships and erode weak ones, so the number matters less than what you are applying it to. The more common problem is not height of standards but the type: specifications like height and education do not predict actual attraction, while standards about how someone treats you do.

Do stated dating preferences predict who you actually like?

No. In a 2008 speed-dating study, participants' stated ideals failed to predict what inspired their actual desire at the event. A 2017 study using machine learning on over a hundred self-report measures could predict how much someone tended to like their dates in general, but not the specific chemistry between any two people, which is the part preferences are supposed to describe.

Does having more dating options help?

Generally not. Studies of speed-dating events found people shifted toward quickly-assessed traits like height at larger events, and that more variety led to fewer proposals. A separate study found people rejected progressively more as they viewed more profiles, an average twenty-seven per cent decrease in acceptance from first option to last, which the researchers called a rejection mind-set.

What is the difference between a standard and a dealbreaker?

A standard describes how you expect to be treated, such as honesty or repairing things after conflict. A dealbreaker is usually a specification about a person's attributes. The research suggests standards of the first kind hold up well and specifications of the second kind do not predict who you will actually fall for. One study across more than 6,500 people found dealbreaker lists tend to get longer, not shorter, as someone's options increase.

Should I lower my standards to find someone?

The research does not support that as general advice, and it does not support never settling either. What it supports is distinguishing between standards about treatment, which predict good relationships, and filters about attributes, which do not predict attraction. Loosening the second while holding the first is better founded than lowering either wholesale.