328 - Relationship Standards: Too High? Too Low?
Too high, too low, just right
A lot of people are reentering the dating scene right now, so we’re going to take a look at the idea behind “relationship standards.”
Standards tend to encompass this: the quality of partner or partnership that we are looking for as well as the baseline of comparison that we may be holding people up to. Your standards are the measuring tool that may inform your expectations of a partner/potential partner’s qualities and behaviors.
Scientifically, Professor W. Kim Holford from the University of Queensland has done extensive research on relationship standards, including how they may show up with intercultural differences, in co-parenting relationships, and in same-sex relationships as well.
According to Professor Holford’s research, these standards come up as important pretty often in heterosexual relationships:
Couple bonding (expressions of care, love, and intimacy).
Family responsibility (managing extended family relationships, maintenance of face and harmony).
Religion (how important both people feel about shared religious rituals, raising children in their faith, or believing that their relationship is blessed or sacred).
Relationship effort/investment.
However, unique to queer relationships are these most common important standards:
Relationship outness.
Sexual openness (openness to forms of non-monogamy).
Dyadic coping with homophobic discrimination.
Standards in polyamory
According to our Patreon base, some common recurring important relationship standards were the following:
Self-aware, willing to do self work, open to therapy .
Similar views about morals/ethics.
Partner has their own schedule, their own life, their own friends, other support systems.
A sense of passion, interests, a life path.
Kindness.
Can respect boundaries and also express their own.
Already okay with non-monogamy.
As for whether or not someone can have standards that are “too high” or “too low,” many of the resources out there are extremely gendered. Typically, women are criticized as having standards that are too high, and often women are also accused of having low self-esteem, which can lead them to have standards that are too low.
Are my standards too high or too low?
Some questions to ask yourself if you’re worried your standards may be too high or too low:
Does this person actually exist in real life?
Are any of these standards actually a defense mechanism that prevents me from feeling uncomfortable or vulnerable? Is it actually protecting me? This may not actually be a bad thing, but important to recognize.
If I could wave a magic wand, what would be the most wonderful, ideal version of a partnership I can imagine?
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the multi Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about relationships standards. Standards are discussed a lot, particularly when people are dating. Many people, usually women, are criticized for having standards that are "too high" hindering their ability to find a partner. Other people might be criticized for having standards that are too low, opening them up to being taken advantage of or keeping them in an unhealthy relationship. In this time, as many more people are jumping back into the dating scene, we'd like to take a look at what standards even are. What does it actually mean to have standards that are too high or too low, and how to reevaluate your standards if you think you need to.
Dedeker: We have covered healthy/unhealthy relationship expectations. That's in Episode 142, which was a while ago.
Jase: That's a thousand years ago.
Dedeker: A thousand billion years ago. We've also covered relationship goals, that was less than a thousand years ago. That was in Multiamory Episode 213, but I realized we haven't necessarily looked at standards. Before we dive into the difference, I want to hear from the two of you just off the top of your head, what do you think of when you hear the word standards in the context of dating and relationships?
Emily: Immediately when I hear the word standard, something that I think about is, for better for worse, just I was not ever raised in a religious environment. I think if I met someone who was uber religious, it would be very challenging for me to date them because I would have no emotional touchstone whatsoever for that. I would have a lot of awkward questions. It wouldn't be great as I do on our other podcasts with the two of you. I do feel like that is a standard or an expectation that somebody, maybe they can be spiritual or whatever, but not that they are like uber, uber religious perhaps.
Jase: Interesting. I think for me, what comes to mind is more just about how you're willing to be treated by a partner by someone you're dating. It would come up in the context of what are your standards in terms of a person being affectionate to you versus being critical or maybe a little bit mean, or maybe standards for how consistently they do what they say they're going to do. Maybe something like that. I also feel like if I heard someone say standards, I might also wonder if what they really meant was how much money this person makes or how attractive this person is. I feel like it really covers a pretty wide range of qualities or things like that.
Dedeker: It really does.
Emily: Yes. I do feel like some people have a very clear idea of what they expect and want in a relationship, and others are more go with the flow. As you said in the intro, some people tend to be told that, "Women believe that their standards are too high or others believe that their standards are too low," or something along those lines. That's something to examine here. I'm interested in what you found, Dedeker.
Dedeker: First, I'm going to combine what both of you said, because just now this just popped up in my brain. When I hear the word standards in the context of dating and relationships, it brings up a memory of an exercise that I did at the tender age of probably 13 or 14 when I was still in the evangelical church. Gosh, and it was an exercise in a Sunday school class of all girls. It was a handout we were given where it was essentially a list of qualities that you might have in a boyfriend or a future husband. Each of these qualities was attached to a dollar figure, and you were given a fictional amount of money.
The purpose of the exercise was like, "What are the qualities that are most important to you?" These qualities were also arbitrarily valued at different price points based on the person who wrote the exercise. As I'm saying this, I cannot remember for the life of me why we did this.
Emily: They probably wanted you to be with someone religious.
Jase: I was thinking of your Sunday school teacher was just like, "They found it," and was like, "I'll do this because I don't know what to do with this kids."
Dedeker: It's quite possible.
Emily: There you go.
Dedeker: I don't remember if the purpose of the exercise was, "Yes, you should be thinking about these things," because obviously you're not dating around. The next person you pick is going to be the person, so you got to be very clear about what your standards are and very clear what you value. Alternately, it's quite possible the whole point of the exercise was to shame women and girls for being too picky or for thinking that they can have a laundry list of expectations of a future partner or whatever.
Jase: Yes. You're trying to train them early to have lower expectations or something. It's like, "You can't afford all of them."
Emily: Really? Oh, goodness.
Jase: Maybe.
Dedeker: It's quite possible. I don't know. I would have to track down that exercise. If anyone else has religious PTSD and grew up during evangelical purity culture and knows what I'm talking about, please reach out to me because I'd be fascinated to take a look at this again. That's what I think of with standards.
Jase: Great.
Emily: There you go.
Dedeker: Let's take a moment, for the purposes of this episode, break down the differences between expectations, standards, other relationship criteria, and also featuring boundaries because it seems like boundaries just make their way into everything.
Emily: These are two definitions for the word standard listed in the dictionary that we found. The first one is a level of quality or attainment. The second is something used as a measure norm or model in comparative evaluations.
Jase: The gold standard or elite standard or AAA standard or whatever. The second one's like this is the standard practice or the standard way to do something.
Emily: Got it. The way we talk about standards in dating and relationships tend to encompass both of these definitions, like the quality of a partner or a partnership that we are looking for, as well as the baseline of comparison that we may be holding people up to. I have heard that a lot out there. I don't think that I think of people in this way. Also, my question is how do immediately if a person is up to your standards or not? This is potentially a lot of information that you have to give someone to figure out whether or not they rise to that standard. You can't probably even find all that out in an evening.
Dedeker: Definitely not. It's interesting to preview a little bit of what's coming later in the episode, is I did pull our Patreon group about this, about how people define standards, what standards they hold, if they think there's such thing as too high or too low standards. That was an interesting recurring theme, that there were people who were very clear on what their standards were often based on past experiences. Based on, "I want a partner who has this, who can do this, who can offer this, who's okay with this," so on and so forth. There were also a lot of people who I think had your same reaction, Emily, of like, "Whoa, I can't think about people or relationships in this way." For me, it's more of a I know it when I see it. It's more of an organic process, more of a feeling out process.
Emily: I think that's where we
Dedeker: Yes. It seems like a little bit of these two different camps of how people approach this.
Jase: Yes. Also, I feel like the topic of standards in relationships comes up both in terms of either criticizing or helping people guide their choices for who they start to date, who to go on that first date with, but then also comes up more in terms of who you choose to stay in relationship with. It is different and like you said, Emily, those later ones, you don't get to know that someone's going to call you names when you argue until you've been in a relationship with them for awhile because they're not going to do that on the first date. just get out then and not worry about it.
Emily: Yes. Standards are different where in at the beginning of a relationship, you're like, "Do I click with this person? Do I like them? Are they interesting to me?" rather than, "Are they going to be the father of my child?" or something.
Dedeker: I do think it does seem to depend on what intention you're holding and what you're looking for when you start dating. I hear about the standards thing more frequently in the context of people who are very intentional of, "I want to find a nesting partner. I want to find someone to co-parent with. I want to find my soul mate." At least what I glean, what I osmose from my own culture and my own community is people tend to have of the sense of, "I need to cling to this particular standards when I'm just looking to casually date, or hook up with somebody."
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: Then how do these standards compare with expectations or maybe boundaries or some other things? These are some definitions that we used from that relationship expectations episode, way back, 142. Expectations concern how you want a relationship to turn out or how you want a partner to act, and then boundaries reflect what your conduct will be in order to protect yourself in light of something that goes counter to your values. Then deal-breakers are behaviors, actions, or qualities that one will not tolerate within their relationship. That's the overlap with boundaries.
A type of boundary is that deal-breaker type of boundary where it's, "If this happens, I'm out totally," versus a boundary that just involves you enforcing that boundary for yourself like, "I'm going to not participate in a conversation where X happens, or I'm not going to be in a room while this is going on," or something like that, that those might be boundaries but not necessarily the deal-breaker type. Then we also defined need as something that you ask for and communicate to your partner, but it's something that you want them to do, rather than something that you are able to do for yourself like a boundary.
Dedeker: I thought that it was important to lay this out because there's a lot of overlap here. I think that standards and expectations, and relationship needs, and deal-breakers, and all these things intersect quite a lot. I don't want to make the argument that these are completely separate concepts that have no overlap whatsoever. I did just want to clarify our language for this episode just to keep that a little bit clear. The way that I think about it, the way that I puzzled all these together and how I think these things relate to each other is, in my brain, it's like your standards, they serve as the measuring tool.
The measuring tool informs your expectations of your partner or your potential partner's qualities or behaviors. Where needs come into play is you communicate your needs, your relationship needs, and you enforce personal boundaries, so that you can co-create the relationship with this other person that does meet your standards, that does meet your measuring tool. Part of that being that, of course, you're using your personal boundaries or you may choose to end a relationship if it's not meeting that standard or if there are certain deal-breakers involved. Does that feel like that clears it up at all? That was the way that I made sense of it in my brain, but language is hard, and these concepts have a lot of overlap.
Emily: Yes, because it feels like values, which we talked about fairly recently as well are also a part of it. One might say values and standards are fairly similar but values are personal and standards are what you throw on to the other person. It's like, "I want you to be these things, I believe in these things for myself." That is the boundaries versus expectation thing, expectation is external and boundaries are internal.
Dedeker: Maybe we need to come up with just one omni word that encompasses everything.
Emily: All of those things?
Dedeker: We'll just make all of our episodes about that one omni word.
Jase: I feel like in this context though that there maybe is the similarity between when we talk about boundaries. We talk about boundaries being this non-negotiable thing that you can enforce yourself, and that it's something that, ideally in a good relationship, you're never touching up against those. Someone who sits right at your boundary is not the goal, that's your last line of defense. It's like we can't go past this point, and hopefully, we don't have to get close to it, very often if at all. Maybe, at least in the way people tend to use standards, it is a little bit more like a minimum standard, it's how people tend to talk about it.
Versus, "I'd like to find someone who does these things or who does that, or has these qualities, but this is the minimum. They've at least got to match up to these in these particular areas." Maybe there's a similar thing to boundaries. I don't think we can use one omni word to replace all of them, of course.
Emily: Probably not.
Dedeker: We could try.
Jase: We could try, I think there's maybe a similar thing there where there's a difference between thinking of a standard as a minimum versus thinking of a standard as this is what I want as a goal in who your partner is or how they treat you or something. I don't know if that’s always how people use it, but I'm just thinking of what distinguishes it from other things like expectations, or desires, or needs, or things like that.
Dedeker: Do you want to know what science says, how science defines standards?
Emily: Oh, yes.
Jase: I love science.
Dedeker: I took a dive into just what research studies are out there on relationships standards. I wasn't necessarily looking for anything in particular, I just wanted to see how do researchers define relationship standards. I went down a really interesting rabbit hole. I stumbled on to the work of Professor W. Kim Halford from the University of Queensland in Australia. He and his colleagues have basically performed a billion years of research on relationship standards. Everything including intercultural differences in relationships and how that influences standards.
Co-parenting relationships, how that influences relationships standards, and also in same-sex relationships as well, which we'll get to a little bit later. This I how he and his colleagues define it, "Relationship standards are beliefs about what makes a good romantic relationship." I think that corresponds of what you were saying, Jase, about it being a little bit different from a bare minimum and more about, "This is what I want. This is something that is desirable for what I think is a good romantic relationship."
Jase: I still think of it as a minimum, but it's a minimum of what's still good versus a boundary which is the minimum tolerable at all of like, "Now, I'm getting out of here if we're even close to this." Interesting. I could still see that being it's the minimum of what still counts as good. Maybe that's a better clarification. Good job Professor Halford.
Dedeker: Professor Halford, well done good job. Actually, very good job because I noticed that Halford and his colleagues seem to be one of the few if not only research teams that are actually looking at relationship standards as they specifically play out in same-sex relationships. Of course, as we've talked about on the show, the really frustrating thing is so much research is just done on whites as heteronormative, often presumably monogamous, sometimes also even married individuals that that's considered the default blueprint for relationship.
Emily: The gold standard as the word.
Jase: Oh, wow, bringing it back around.
Dedeker: It is, yes. I was really excited to see that they're actually doing research on relationships and on people that are not that, which is super helpful and really valuable. He did a 2020 study titled Assessment of Couple Relationship Standards in Same-Sex Attracted Adults, where he and his research team laid out both the common relationship standards that have been determined by other studies to be important in heterosexual relationships, as well as some relationship standards that a unique to same-sex relationships, which I thought was so valuable.
Basically, the whole point of this study is there's already an existing research assessment scale for relationship standards that have been applied for heterosexual couples. The whole point of this was to create one that also included these unique standards that show up in same-sex relationships, which I thought was really important work. These are the ones that are on the standard scale in a lot of research on relationship standards right now. The first one is couple bonding is held as an important relationship standard. That includes things like expressions of care, love, intimacy, things like that.
Another one is family responsibility. That looks at things like how do we manage our extended family relationships, how do we maintain face. Essentially like our social face, how do we maintain harmony without our family. This one really surprised me, religion is also on the scale, as in how important we both feel in our partnership about shared religious rituals. How important we feel it is to raise children in a particular faith, or how important it is to hold a belief that our relationship is sacred or blessed by a higher power in some way.
Jase: I'm surprised that this surprised you at all though. Because if that's an important thing in your life, then absolutely. That was always what was just beat into all of us growing up Christian was you have to date and you have to eventually marry a Christian person. Because otherwise, they're going to lead you astray, your kids will be awful.
Emily: For sure that happened.
Jase: All that stuff.
Dedeker: It did happen to us.
To both of us.
Emily: There we go.
Dedeker: They're not wrong.
Jase: That one doesn't surprise me at all. I'm like "Yes, if that's something you think is really important, then that's going to be an important thing to find in a partner," or maybe we do get led astray.
Dedeker: It surprised me because I wasn't expecting it to pop up in a research study. I wasn't expecting it to be such a factor that seemed to be-- at least, the study seemed to suggest that this was relatively universal. That was the thing that caught me off guard. The last one here is relationship effort/investment.
Emily: That's really interesting. I wonder exactly what that means, how much effort one puts into the relationship or how invested you are? Yes, if you get two people who are just casually dating, for example, then perhaps they'll fit together really well versus one person who wants to casually date and one person who wants to marry someone else. That's not going to go well.
Jase: That makes sense.
Emily: That makes sense. Unique to queer relationships are things like relationship outness. If you and your partner are both out, that makes a big difference.
Jase: When you talked about this study at first, Dedeker, I was like, "What are the unique things like relationships to relationships?" I'm like, "Oh, yes, outness, that makes sense. That is a different sort of thing," and can definitely apply, I would say, also to something like non-monogamous relationships because it is that factor of how open are you about the relationship that we might have with each other.
Emily: Also, sexual openness is another part of this, like openness to forms of non-monogamy. Because in some queer relationships, that is the standard as it were, and in others, that's not as much.
Jase: I might make an argument that that was already part of their standards. They just didn't call it that. Maybe what they roped into relationship effort/investment, part of that piece is also, "Do you want to be monogamous? To them, that's just, "Oh, that's just investment in a relationship," because, again, that's the default.
Dedeker: Quite possibly.
Jase: I bet that's even in there, but people just didn't know how to ask the questions in quite the right way.
Dedeker: I didn't do the deep dive into specifically, what were the questions they were asking people using this particular scale to evaluate that because that wasn't the point of this particular paper. That's a really good point.
Emily: Also, something unique to queer relationships is dyadic coping with homophobic discrimination. How do you and your partner or partners deal with homophobic discrimination? What do you do when that affects you? That's something that is unique in that way.
Jase: Absolutely.
Dedeker: It's something that the study pointed out, as far as practical applications here is, for instance, queer couples or same-sex couples who are seeking out something like therapy together, how important it is to have a therapist who's not just limited to this previous set of relationship standards and evaluating how matched couples are on those. These are also extra things that therapists who are helping queer couples may need to think about because they're also important.
Emily: Absolutely. Bear in mind that these studies suggests that partners need to have similar standards regarding each of these areas in order to maximize relationship satisfaction, as opposed to suggesting that a relationship needs to highly value religion or sexual openness in order to be healthy. Dissimilarity is the main thing here because perhaps you don't really care that much about being sexually open or religion, for example, things like that. It's just the scale on which both of you are.
Jase: Now, just from this brief description, I'm like, "You could have two people who think religion is very important, but they're in different religions, and that's not compatible." It's not even in a linear scale exactly, but that makes sense. Do we have to be similar in however that area is, however we might measure that area.
Emily: Clearly, that works as well with some relationships. It doesn't necessarily matter, but something to think about for sure. All right. We are going to move on and talk more about things like non-monogamy, food for thought about that. Also, is it possible to have too high or too low standards. Before we get into that, we're going to discuss some ways that you can help our show out and continue bringing it to the masses for free.
Jase: We're back. The question on everyone's mind, of course, is what about the non-monogamous folks? We talked about it a little, but is anyone researching this? Maybe we have to be the ones to take this deeper dive into it. People who are polyamorous, non-monogamous or relationship anarchist, or something else, they might not only hold very different relationship standards but also may hold different standards for different types of concurrent relationships. You may have a very different standard for a comet relationship, who you see maybe once a year, versus someone who you want to live with, versus someone who you might date casually versus someone who might just be a play partner.
There's so many different ways those relationships could look. I'd say to go back to some of the things we saw before with the standards about how invested you might be in a relationship, clearly, one might look at those and say, "Rather than what am I invested in right now or what am I looking for right now, it's what am I looking for in this relationship, even at the same time as other ones where I might be looking for something else." There's some interesting stuff for us to get into here.
Dedeker: The closest thing that I could do to a very quick research study was posting in our Patreon-only group people.
Emily: Thank you all. It's so great.
Dedeker: Patreon-only group largely, but not exclusively identifies as some form of non-monogamous or relationship anarchist. I was curious to see what kind of relationship standards people are holding when they are seeking out new partners specifically. I got like 800 billion comments on my post.
Jase: Love it.
Dedeker: It was a little bit overwhelming. I wasn't expecting that much response. I read through all of them, and I did pick out some recurring themes that I thought was really interesting. A lot of people talked about holding a standard of a potential partner being self-aware in some form or fashion. This took on the form of they're willing to do self-work or they know themselves. They know what they need, or they are open to therapy, or maybe even already going to therapy if they need it, or if they want it. That was one standard that a lot of people expressed.
Which is something that I didn't really come across when I was looking at much more of the traditional heteronormative resources about relationship standards. A lot of people expressed also wanting to find someone who has similar views as far as about morals or ethics. Sometimes, that was specifically about political views. Often, it just came back to, "We have to share similar morals and a similar sense of ethics."
Jase: The morals and ethics question is interesting, but I could see that making sense that it would be extra important in non-monogamous relationships because if you're stepping outside of saying there's this predefined script about what relationships look like, and how we behave socially and sexually and stuff like that, that we're doing a lot more outside of that box, just going, "We're paving our own path." That really relies much more heavily on thinking about your morals and your ethics, and making choices not just because it's what everyone does, but because you're really evaluating that. I think that makes a lot of sense that it would be extra important to find someone who lines up with you in those ways.
Dedeker: Another recurring theme was this idea of, "I want to find a partner who has their own schedule, they have their own life, they have their own friends. Essentially, they have other support systems and other things going on than just me and just the relationship," which I also thought was really interesting. That doesn't really show up when I look at these very traditional list of relationships standards.
Emily: I think a lot of people their friends become much more like backburner to their main core relationship and potentially kids and the family life. That is really interesting that there's that specific distinction here. I appreciate that about it. Because I think regardless of what type of relationship you're in, having your own things is really, really important.
Dedeker: Absolutely.
Jase: Most of us just-
Emily: Don't think about that.
Jase: - you won't have any other relationships or life outside of me if we're together.
Dedeker: That it's quite okay and quite healthy if you don't have any of that.
Jase: That certainly how I live all of my romantic relationships before starting to explore non-monogamy, and that's when it all started coming apart and realizing that that wasn't the best thing, actually.
Dedeker: Somewhat related to that was a lot of people express wanting to find a partner or a partnership where the other person has a sense of passion, something they're passionate about, a sense of their own interests or maybe a life path, not necessarily a career path. I think the traditional version of this is wanting someone who has a stable job perhaps or has an established career. It seemed like people were more open to this person has some life path, something that's guiding them, something that is driving them forward, not necessarily career-based. I don't know why this was a little bit surprising, but a lot of people just said kindness. That's the standard.
Emily: I'm glad it's on there.
Dedeker: Yes, I think it's great.
Emily: The other research that we looked at didn't name that as one, and I'm sure people want their partners to be kind. I appreciate that our Patreons are saying that.
Dedeker: These are good people. A lot of people also expressed wanting someone who can respect other people's boundaries, and also express their own boundaries, like wanting someone who is able to say no to things, so that they can trust that their partner is actually able to consent or not to different things, not just sexual situations but life situations in general. Of course, one that a lot of people expressed was holding a standard of dating someone who's already okay with non-monogamy or maybe even already experienced or possibly even already partnered as well.
Jase: It all makes sense. Something that came up for me when thinking about all of these things, too, is just how a lot of these standards, whether they're that more previously studied monogamous standards or if they're these ones we're talking about in non-monogamy, just how important it is to maybe move away from thinking about them all as a linear scale of all of these of like, "High on this scale is good and low is bad," and more like the researchers were saying before. We'll get into this more later when we talk about too high and too low standards.
The researchers before saying it's more important that you match on these things or that your partner fits these things that are standards to you, not to say that someone who doesn't fit those is bad or that you think those people are less than you or something. I think that's an important distinction to make that gets missed in a lot of the popular articles and talk about the subject of standards. It is treated a little bit more-- it just means better. You should be dating people who are better, rather than people who are a better fit for you.
I think that this list helped clarify that for me. That's really what matters the most. Because to someone else, these qualities might be terrible qualities to them. It would not be something they want, again, like we saw with the list before about religion or sexual openness or something that some people might want less of those things. That's becoming more and more clear as we do this episode.
Emily: Standards are as unique as the individual who has them which is great.
Dedeker: Are you saying perhaps there's no standard for standards?
Emily: I don't know, I mean, are there baseline standards that everyone should be okay with? I don't know.
Dedeker: Maybe not.
Emily: That's the question.
Dedeker: Gosh, that I think that's almost like cracking open the egg of is there moral relativity or is it more absolute? I don't know. Is their standards relativity or is their standards absolute? On this episode of Multi-philosophery.
Emily: There you go. Indeed. Anytime you add more than one person to a relationship, it's going to just add some more things to think about and some more considerations to have. Here's some food for thought for non-monogamous folks that might seem a little contradictory, but they are two fundamental truths and one we talked about briefly before, is that not every relationship you have has to have the same standard. It doesn't have to be held to the same standard like that comet partner out there that you may have a different standard for, versus the one that is your live-in partner, your standard of communication with them, your expectations may be very different between those two people.
That's totally fine. Also, second, you may have some standards that are healthy for you to hold regardless of the type of relationship. You may have a baseline for yourself of care and respect and communication with both your casual comet partner and your live-in partner. They seem like they're a little bit diametrically opposed, but they're not. They still can both be true, even if they are a little separate from one another.
Dedeker: Something we've talked about on the show before is that there's quite a lot of polyamory PR out there that makes the argument of like, "Oh, yes, the great thing about non-monogamy is you can get all these different needs met by different people. Do a little bit of this mix and match." That is great. That is fantastic. At the same time, there may be things, there may be standards, boundaries, expectations, needs, all of these things, the omni word that we have yet to come up with, that may be true across the board regardless of the person, regardless of how casual or connected or overlapping or intertwined the relationship is.
This is really interesting work that I find myself doing a lot with my clients, especially when it comes to things like navigating more casual relationships. Because like we talked about earlier in this episode, for some reason, I think socially, there's less of an expectation that you're going to have particular standards around a casual relationship. Unfortunately, we'd have this unofficial script for casual relationships of like, "Oh, we're just fuck buddies." That means we hook up. Maybe we're friendly. No cuddling, no real communication, keeping each other at arms length.
Emily: I had a guy who said no kissing.
Dedeker: Boy, oh, boy.
Emily: We could have sex but no kissing.
Dedeker: Did you do it? Did you do him?
Emily: Yes, I was sleeping with him for a while. Then eventually, after a while, he was like, "You know what, we're getting too intimate, we need to not kiss. We can have sex but not kiss." That was a low standard that I had that I kept around for a while. It's real not cool.
Dedeker: I think that's actually a perfect example that I find myself helping a lot of clients come to the realization of like, "Yes, I can consent to a casual relationship. I can be really clear about what I expect and don't expect from this relationship, but I can also recognize there's a particular standard of care or communication that's not being met by this casual relationship." I think that's really revolutionary for a lot of people because I think we have been socialized to think if it's a casual relationship, expect absolutely nothing.
Emily: Good luck.
Dedeker: Don't expect them to text you back, don't expect them to be kind to you, don't expect them to care about your well-being, don't expect to be able to make any requests of them, when that's not true. Actually, the best, "more casual relationships" are ones, in my opinion, that have all those things. That's just something I encourage people to think about that we can get hemmed in by these boxes of how we think our standards are supposed to be for different types of relationships, and there may be some things that you hold that are actually a little bit more universal even if this person is not the person that you're co-parenting or living with.
Emily: Like, "Fucking kiss me if you're going to fucking fuck me."
Dedeker: Exactly, that guy, I hope he's listening.
Jase: That's a good quite.
Emily: He's not.
Dedeker: I will anonymously-- not even anonymously, I will randomly send off this episode to him with no explanation. You can figure it out. Great.
Emily: Amazing.
Jase: We've been dancing around this for a little while, and it's time to address the question. Is it possible to have standards that are too high or too low? Does it even make sense to say high or low when referring to standards? We're going to get into this. This question is super interesting because if you consult the internet on this, you will find a lot of very, very gendered resources, very heteronormative gendered resources. Basically, it's that women are criticized for having standards that are too high, and it's often women who are also accused of having low self-esteem, which leads to them having standards that are too low.
Emily: men are just allowed to have whatever the fuck they want.
Jase: Yes, so let's talk about that a little.
Dedeker: A lot of these much more "traditional resources" out there, do speak to the importance of self-esteem and self-worth in order to create healthy standards that aren't too high and aren't too low. What's interesting is our research assistant for this episode pointed out the fact that when she was researching, she couldn't find any advice around having high self-esteem that was directed at men, it's always directed at women. Even when she googled "relationship standards for men," all of the resources on the first page were still directed towards women looking for men.
Jase: The standards to apply to men.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: Are men this really hot commodity? It's just strange to me.
Jase: Gosh, we could do a whole episode on this. We've touched on it a little bit before, but it's just that thing that I think in our mainstream traditional culture, there's this assumption that men just don't care that much about anything besides being attracted to the person. there's also maybe a bit of an assumption that women are always going to be nice to men. It's just that men aren't always nice to women, and so women are the ones who need to have standards.
Dedeker: I think that also ropes in the assumption that women are always going to want to be monogamous .
Jase: Yes. Right. Standard-wise, that's often one of the standards is does he want to just be with you, does he treat you like a queen or whatever. Depending on what articles you find, it's either worded in a very traditional religious way or it's worded in this very young, modern, hip language, but they're basically saying the same stuff. They're basically still all prescribing to this same belief that just it sucks, it's really problematic for so many reasons, and like I said, we could do a whole episode on it. I think it really does everyone a disservice by, one, assuming that men don't have standards and that it's not even worth talking about. Then also assuming that any relationship compatibility issues are entirely women's faults for not having high enough or low enough standards. No one's being helped by this.
Dedeker: Speaking of problematic things, the only place that I have come across resources or content aimed at men about their standards has been often in like really gross pickup artist spaces, where the standards are only about where a woman falls on a scale of 0 to 10. That's the first thing that comes to mind for me. Maybe there's some secret treasure trove for crunchy, with it, feminist guys where it's talking about their standards and stuff like that, that's out there that I haven't found. That's what my exposure has been to it.
Jase: Maybe it's just that language is not the language that's used. Maybe it's just that calling it standards might be something that's just because that's so entrenched in this one way of looking at relationships that maybe the other advice out there just doesn't talk about it in that way. That's an interesting thing. Maybe someone out there will make this resource though if it doesn't exist already.
Emily: I think you mean us, and yeah, we should work on that perhaps. Dedeker also asked the Patreon group this question that's too high, too low question, and there were some really interesting responses. The primary recurring theme was that if people accuse you of having standards that are too high or of being too picky, just don't believe them. Just, no. It may make it harder to date, but sacrificing too much can lead to a lot of hurt and regret. That's really interesting.
Dedeker: A lot of people said that in various ways of just, "I've been criticized," people have said too picky, but at this point I've learned, no, my standards are just right.
Emily: That's great.
Jase: That's great.
Emily: I love that. Good.
Jase: I think also it comes with experience. I think at least my impression is a lot of the stuff writing about relationships standards are written for people who are maybe newer to having relationships, haven't had as many of them or maybe have only had a couple bad ones. I don't think this is universally true. Generally speaking, non-monogamous people, if you've been doing it for a while, you've just had more relationships period because of the fact that you can have them at the same time, and that's acceptable, and everyone's open about that. I do think it does help increase that experience needed to really fine tune and understand your own standards.
Emily: Other people pointed out that it is often a lifelong calibration process for standards, like what you're saying, Jase. You may fluctuate between highs and lows until you find what creates your ideal dating pool. Another interesting take was if you look back and think that your standards in the past were too high too low, that might be true, or it might just be a sign that you're changing and so are your standards. We talked about this. All of us are ever evolving, nothing that we do necessarily stays the same just forever. You're born, and then that's it. Good luck, your standards are going to be what they are. If you're non-monogamous later in life, then clearly your standards are going to change from when you were potentially monogamous and looking for something else entirely.
Jase: I'm curious for the two of you if there are ways that you feel like your standards have changed. Because when I look back, I'm just like, "Gosh," mine have gone through so many huge changes. From being waiting till marriage, looking for soulmate monogamous way of thinking to not being as strict in that, but still thinking more monogamously, or maybe like almost a little bit swinger lifestyle-y to then non-monogamy and polyamory, having a very different look at that. Then even within that from what I was looking for in partners, looking for certain types of intimacy or certain types of communication that now I feel like I'm looking for very different ones in terms of learning some things.
Part of it's just really learning what a wonderful thing it is to find someone who's good at saying no and who's clear about that. Because it's so freeing when someone's able to say no to you that it's like, "Great. Now we're on the way toward being clearer with each other and not having to do as much guessing," which is great. It's just something like that that I never would have considered before.
Dedeker: I would say that if I think back to when I first started dating and started experimenting with relationships in general, I think my standards before what I believe made for a good relationship was probably just, "Hang out with me all the time until I tell you to go away, and then don't speak to me."
Jase: I feel that's still a little bit fair.
Dedeker: I'd like to think of maybe a healthier, more communicated version of that.
Jase: Maybe more clearly communicated.
Emily: My expectation of how much a person is around me and how much I am so deeply entrenched in their lives, I think I am very entrenched in my partner's life, but I'm dating someone who isn't an actor and isn't in that kind of community at all. We very much have different hobbies and skills and things like that. I think that's changed for me. I don't necessarily need someone to be doing the same things that I am in order for it to work. Rather, I can learn a lot of cool things that are different from any skill set that I have with my partners. That's cool. I dated a lot of people in the industry.
Dedeker: Haven't we all?
Jase: Yes. I suppose we all have.
Emily: It's nice to take a break from that.
Dedeker: See, my strategy when I was still acting, and my strategy that I still hold to this day is date people just adjacent to the industry.
Emily: That's what you're doing now.
Dedeker: of VFX people
Emily: I see that.
Jase: It has been for years. Oh, man. Something that's interesting though, hearing what both of you said and what I was talking about is that it does seem very clear that there's a little bit of adjusting how high or low standards or in a certain way, maybe. It seems more than that it's just about fine tuning what's the range in each category, or what are some of the specifics in each thing. Calling them high or low is maybe part of what I'm ending up taking issue with as we've been diving into this more. Maybe calling them high and low isn't so much the issue, but maybe it's more looking at how big is your window for flexibility within this standard area.
That's still going to feel really good, that still could be a good relationship. I think that's an area where at least in the traditional way of looking at relationships, some of my areas of that you might call lower. I've just learned that that's not a need that I have to have met by every single romantic partner of mine or every single sexual partner. I think it is a little bit more about just tweaking and finding what are the things that matter to you, and what's the range of those. Then also in non-monogamy, there's the option of depending who it is that I'm meeting or connecting with, I might go, "I know now that these sorts of things fit better within the standards that I have for a play partner than it does for a very serious romantic partner or someone I'm going to live with," or something like that.
It might help you actually determine what relationship would be good and see if that works for them, too. Because they've also got standards on the other side as well. That's important to keep in mind. Let's look at some practical exercises that you can do for examining your standards, getting some clarity on that for yourself especially if you're someone who's like, "Gosh, I don't even know. I haven't thought about this." First thing, this comes from Jason Sackett, who is a licensed clinical social worker, and he says, "A good starting place for setting standards is writing down a list of the qualities and behaviors that make you the happiest in a relationship or the most meaningful to you and that are non-negotiable."
Essentially out of that, you can make a wants list and a needs list. To go back to what we talked about before of, "Here's my minimum standard in this, but here's where I'd actually like to be in this area. Here's what I like to find, here's a minimum standard." You're starting to establish a range or an area in that, and feel free to update this list continuously. Revisit this, go back and be like, "You know what, actually, that one turned out not to be so important," or, "This one, that thing I thought was the minimum standard, actually, my minimum was what I said I just wanted before." It's like, "Now, that's the minimum, and what I want is higher than that." Just keep adjusting it. Keep tweaking it as you learn and have experiences.
Dedeker: We also have a few questions to ask if you are out there, and you're worried about having standards that are too high or too low. You can ask yourself questions like, "Does this person actually exist in real life? Is there actually a chance that they do?" You can ask yourself, "Are any of my standards actually a defense mechanism that's preventing me from feeling uncomfortable or vulnerable?" I want to clarify, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're realizing like, "Yes, this is something that's preventing me from experiencing some pain or it's in place because of some pain I experienced in the past," I'm all about that.
I just think it's important to recognize. Then ask the follow-up question, "Is this actually protecting me? Is my intention in having the standard actually protecting me from pain or from a discomfort or vulnerability that I just don't want to experience?" If it is, great. If it's not, then that's also something to reconsider. Lastly, a question that you can ask yourself is, "If I could wave a magic wand, what would be the most wonderful, ideal version of a partnership that I can imagine?" This one's more directed for people who I think are worried about their standards being too low.
I think it's really important to think about what would just be wonderful, as opposed to what do you think that you deserve or what do you think your other partner is going to be okay with, or whatever it is that tapping into that I think can really wake up that sense of what would actually feel really, really good for you instead of just tolerable or just--
Emily: Our good friend John Gottman recommends striving-
Dedeker: We're not friends.
Emily: I know we're not, but I wish we were. We just talked about him on the show a lot, so it feels like we're friends. He recommends striving for relationships that are good enough, which means that people expect to be treated with kindness, love, respect, and affection, free of emotional and physical abuse, manage conflict, and repair well-enough that everyone feels validated and understood. Those are simple baseline things that are good enough in a relationship and a good starting place for yourself with another person.
Dedeker: The Gottmans are all about this whole "Good enough relationship thing," and not to imply that it's like you should be settling at every turn, but more to imply, "Your relationship doesn't have to be perfect. This person doesn't have to be perfect. Your relationship doesn't have to be this big, amazing cosmic healing force in your life." It can be that, and that's great, but it doesn't have to be. The Gottmans often come back to like, "Can you sit down and have a cup of coffee and have a really good conversation? Can you still do that five years in? Can you still do that 10 years in?" That feels like a very low standard to some people. The more that I think about it, the more that it makes sense to me.