Dating Requirements

~ Laura

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My single friends who use Match.com and other online dating websites often mock the requirement lists of the single guys. This requirement list is absolutely awesome.

I missed the whole online dating thing. I found Steve in a library, rather than a website. Would I have found the whole thing fun or annoying? It might be amusing to draw up a list like that.

Published by Laura

46 thoughts on “Dating Requirements”

      1. Some reporter is dating a guy who insists he make her a sandwich everyday. The reporter confused this with love and a publisher confused it with “news.”

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      3. I thought about Julie & Julia (I like food! I like France! I like a good gimmick!) for about five pages. Turns out the book requires a much, much higher tolerance for self-involved twits than I have.

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  2. Pretty much none of his requirements are that weird or unusual. What is weird and unusual and off-putting is that he’s saying all of this out loud, instead of just thinking it.

    I have also noticed the problem of sad, lonely single guys with long, long lists of specifications. I suspect that both internet pornography and internet shopping contribute to this problem, because they create the illusion that whatever you want, it’s out there, you can find it if you look long enough, and you can have it. You want Hello Kitty boots–they exist and you can buy them. You want [fill in unusual perversion here]–there’s lots of it on the internet. Also, both porn and shopping are one-sided transactions. You choose the porn or the boots–they don’t have to choose you, too.

    My bet–he’s eventually going to put a mail order bride on a credit card.

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    1. I have a friend– a smart and funny but also balding and overweight guy in his mid-30′– that I think has a list of totally unrealistic expectations and characteristics for women he might potentially date. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in a decade because he hasn’t been able to find someone with this very specific combination of characteristics. In his case at least, I think he is terrified of putting himself out there, trying to date and getting rejected, and this list sort of acts like the protection of his vulnerability. Trying to meet someone is hard and getting dumped sucks but by having the list he can tell himself that he is just “choosy” and that’s the real reason he doesn’t ever date.

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      1. In college, when I’d meet a guy who had some crazy standards for a girlfriend (I don’t think they were usually put in list form at that time- internet dating wasn’t a thing yet) I usually suspected that they were gay, and often I was right. But, just being afraid of being rejected is also pretty plausible, too.

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      2. I have a colleague like this. Desperately lonely, but turns down or actively doesn’t pursue every woman who is interested in him for some really superficial reason. The silliest reason yet was that one woman was a rock climber, so her biceps were too defined. I don’t think he’s gay, I think it’s just more lots of insecurities, and it’s easier for him to frame himself as unlucky in love than to actually deal with engage with the attractive women willing to date him. Another example is of an successful date some friends set him up on with a girl who had expressed interested in him. Apparently the date went pretty well, except he never followed up afterwards despite expressing interest in the woman. Two months later, after lots of pestering from his friends, he contacted her, only to find she was seeing someone else. He wrote it off as an example of how women weren’t interested in him.

        For the guy in the OP, apparently he is completely and horribly racist, and I hope he ends up single for the rest of his life.

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  3. True story: A few months back, I was reading a sad, lonely guy’s long list of girlfriend specs. Eventually it hit me–he was looking for an anime heroine to date! I wish I could find this for you guys.

    It’s such an awful tactical mistake–to come up with your vision of the perfect woman and then to get disappointed when you can’t find her in real life.

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  4. I recently saw an article looking at the proportion of people who met their partner through different mechanisms:

    Where couples find each other

    There’s been a huge increase in “met online” (though met through friends still is the plurality for heterosexual couples). I wondered how picking lists and not people would affect interactions before: say with sperm donors because the list people go through in picking sperm donors always seemed so sterile (ha ha) (i.e. height > 6 feet, blue eyes, not bald, . . . .). I remember folks joking when Melissa Etheridge and her partner produced offspring using David Crosby’s sperm, asking, “why would you pick an old bald guy to father your child?” and thinking, how limited a set of criterion it was to want hair, blue eyes and over six feet tall in the father of your children.

    It’s an intresting question, how using criteria and not personal judgment will influence outcomes. In dating, I’ve definitely seen the articles saying that internet dating is at lleast (or more) effective than other means of picking spouses.

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  5. “I usually suspected that they were gay,”

    Interesting insight — I would have actually said that proximity usually seems to breed some kind of interest (i.e mix boys and girls or men and women together, and many of them will pair up in some way, which makes sense, biologically). So, the subset that don’t seem to find anyone being gay would be an explanation

    Adding the internet as the way you mix people together (does that take out the biology?) might change things a lot.

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  7. The list in the poster doesn’t seem weird at all. I fancy our hostess would pass, as would my wife (she wears glasses, but she didn’t wear them on dates, or at the party where I met her), and most of the women who read this blog. The full text of the list, if you click on the link, is a little more outlandish.

    Maybe Laura can post her list, and I’ll see if I qualify.

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    1. As near as I can tell from walking around here this summer, the only way the kids today are going to find a partner without a tattoo is if they start dating people the age of their parents.

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    2. I think part of it is there’s a difference between dating a woman who meets those criteria and only being willing to date a woman who meets those criteria. For example, probably most white men have never dated a black woman, and I wouldn’t hold it against anyone for having a racially homogeneous dating past. Not being willing to date a black woman is a completely different issue, and if I were dating a guy who categorically ruled out dating races of people, it would be a deal breaker. Same with many of the things on the list. There’s also the issue that men who are obsessed with women not being “sluts” tend to be creepy misogynists, and I would run, not walk, from a man who said he was only interested in classy women, not slutty women.

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  8. There’s another internet watering hold that I frequent that has a lot of these guys. One of them was saying yesterday that at 32, he felt that it was already too late for him.

    I was helpfully pointing out that that wasn’t true at all. Eventually, in the nursing home, he’ll find that there are lots and lots of cute widows for the picking. Granted, they’ll be in their 60s and 70s, but so will he. So, at 32, it’s not too late. (I didn’t mention it, but I looked it up, and at age 85, there are two women for every man. Woohoo!)

    (Whiny single guys bring out the sadist in me, which is not hard to do, I’m afraid.)

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  9. “I think part of it is there’s a difference between dating a woman who meets those criteria and only being willing to date a woman who meets those criteria.”

    But this is part of the problem — when all you have is a list (not a person), it’s easy to imagine that the things on the list are important, and maybe even critically important. And online dating is a list and not a person. What’s more, I bet folks at the sites are asked to make a list through some form of guided questionnaire.

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    1. Exactly.

      A guy was asking dating advice online recently who said he was black and 5’7″ and an engineer, looking for a Catholic woman. I mentioned that his race and height would be part of the exclusion factors for online dating, so he might actually do better in person than online if he has a decent personality. A lot of women might be clicking “nobody under 5’10″” without thinking how terribly limiting that is.

      http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=823578

      There was another guy who was (by his own description) short and Asian, 32, and his longest run of dating the same person was 19 days. What does he blame? Law school and God. He found the perfect woman, and God took her away from him.

      http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=819609

      I think the short black guy will eventually do very well (and I said so)–he seemed to have a pleasant personality and none of the self-pity and smoldering resentment toward women that a lot of these single guys have.

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      1. none of the self-pity and smoldering resentment toward women that a lot of these single guys have.

        This is a big thing. Resentment in general is one of the most unattractive emotions (and the internet and blogs are full of it and feed it) and resentment towards women or men will obviously make you unattractive to anyone except predators of some sort- the male and female versions are different, but I think that people in this state both seek out bad sorts and attracted them, as they seem like marks for those who want to take advantage. Of course, this perpetuates the cycle.

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  10. I have red hair, but I would never date a guy who says that he prefers redheads. BECAUSE THAT’S WEIRD. I cannot write in a public forum the gross things said to me at bars by total strangers who have a thing for redheads. It’s all along the rugs/drapes variety.

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  12. My sister had a truly embarrassing list in her youth. Her Perfect Man would have shared her tastes in music, hobbies, and politics. Age and experience brought wisdom.

    Many people have such lists, even if they don’t publish them on the internet. If they don’t have them, they behave as if they did. So what? I would worry more if this man wanted to have children.

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    1. “If they don’t have them, they behave as if they did.”

      And their friends will notice, even if they do not. “Hey, he/she looks like your type. Why not go say hello?”

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  13. “I would worry more if this man wanted to have children.”

    His description of the physical ravages of childbirth cannot be unread.

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    1. MH,

      That was amazing.

      “Darling, I have spent all my money on gold, so we will have to consummate our marriage on this bare mattress.”

      Is he really claiming to be 39? No way.

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      1. I remember touring some palaces around St. Petersburg done in roughly that style (they make you put on little booties to protect the inlaid wood floors). I expect that was his inspiration.

        He’s not 39. I’ve seen Russian 39–that is not 39.

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  18. bj, I’ve picked out a sperm donor for my children, and it wasn’t quite what you are imagining. Usually there are very good reasons to select some attributes (coloring and ethnic background that, for example, match the partner as much as possible so as to mimic the kind of biological genetic combinations you’d get if you could actually create a kid with said partner; or, you know, a medical background that at the least doesn’t add to the chances of something in your own genetics being passed down), and lots of others go unnoticed or wash out. Sometimes, there isn’t actually much choice once you select an eye color, a history of successful pregnancy, and a particular medical history.

    It isn’t all that much different than finding someone attractive on the basis of the combination of physical, family, education, etc, features they present. I went in looking to see what was available, and chose from there, not armed with a specific list.

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  19. Jeh — I was being flippant, mostly based on a book I read once by a couple who was kind of flippant in their list (a laundry list of hipster coolness was their main criterion, and included biracial, though neither member of the couple was) and single mothers, who don’t have a partner to match. I didn’t mean to be flippant about real people making complicated choices.

    But the difference between choosing a person and choosing a set of characteristics is there — for those not trying to match a person

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