Your Dating "Standards" Might Just Be Fear With Good Paperwork

Somewhere on a Dallas dating app right now, someone is scrolling past a genuinely good person because he's five foot eleven and the list says six feet minimum. Somewhere else, someone's swiping left on a woman who loves her job a little too visibly, because the list says ambitious but not too ambitious. Nobody wrote these rules down as fear. They wrote them down as standards.

The common belief is that having a long, specific list of dealbreakers protects you from getting hurt again. Sometimes it does. And sometimes, according to a recent piece that's been circulating widely, the list isn't protecting you from a bad match. It's protecting you from ever getting close enough to anyone to find out.

Fear with excellent paperwork

Writer Noah David put it more bluntly than most in a piece for Elephant Journal this year. His argument: after enough bad love, fear gets clever. It stops calling itself fear and puts on a nice shirt and calls itself standards, or boundaries, or knowing what I want [1]. He describes the end result as a boundary with a drawbridge, armed guards, and a crocodile-filled moat, a list made so impossibly specific that no actual human being could ever get through the door [1].

That's not a knock on having standards. It's a distinction most people never sit with long enough to notice. A standard filters for compatibility. A moat filters for safety, specifically the safety of never being tested. The two can look identical from the outside, a long list of must-haves and dealbreakers, and feel completely different once you actually examine what each requirement is doing.

There's real psychology behind why this particular disguise works so well. Foundational attachment research on avoidance of intimacy found that people with an avoidant orientation toward closeness don't usually experience it as fear in the moment. They experience it as preference, as simply not being that interested in this particular person, this time, for this specific reason [2]. The list does the emotional labor of making avoidance feel like discernment.

The difference between a real standard and a moat

A real standard is usually about something structural: do we want the same kind of relationship, do we handle conflict in remotely compatible ways, do our values point in the same direction. A moat is usually about something arbitrary that happens to be easy to measure and easy to justify rejecting someone over: a height cutoff, an income floor, a specific college, a zodiac sign. The tell isn't the requirement itself. It's whether the requirement predicts anything real about whether the relationship would actually work, or whether it just predicts how quickly you can eliminate someone before they get close enough to matter.

Attachment researchers have found something specific about how avoidant patterns show up in practice: people high in this orientation aren't usually consciously choosing to reject good options. They report genuinely not feeling drawn to people who, by every outside measure, would be considered strong matches [2]. The moat isn't a cynical strategy most people are aware of running. It operates underneath conscious choice, which is exactly why it's so easy to mistake for taste.

This is exactly the gap the SPARK Quiz was built to close. It doesn't ask your height or your income bracket. It asks about social energy style, partnership values, attachment pattern, relationship vision, and conflict or connection style, the five dimensions that actual compatibility research points to as load-bearing. None of those can be gamed into a moat, because none of them are the kind of arbitrary, surface-level filter fear likes to hide behind.

Why this shows up so much more in online dating specifically

Part of what makes the moat so easy to build is the sheer size of the pool it's built inside of. A landmark study on choice overload found that past a certain point, more unfiltered options make people less satisfied with whatever they eventually choose, and less likely to commit to it at all [3]. When there's always another profile one swipe away, narrowing your own criteria feels like protecting your time. What it's often actually doing is giving you permission to reject the person in front of you without ever having to sit with why.

An app with an infinite feed makes that permission structure easy to maintain indefinitely. There's always a plausible next option, so there's never a real cost to raising the bar one more inch. A single night at an event, where the pool is real, present, and finite, works differently. You can't quietly filter someone out over a technicality when they're sitting across the table from you and the quiz already told you your actual compatibility dimensions line up.

That line, adapted from the same piece, is the part that actually lands. No list, no matter how specific, changes the basic deal. Real connection always carries some exposure. The moat doesn't protect you from that fact. It just delays finding it out, often for years, at the cost of a lot of decent people you talked yourself out of for reasons that had nothing to do with compatibility.

What actual standards look like instead

This isn't an argument for having no standards or settling for whoever shows up. It's an argument for auditing which of your requirements are actually predictive and which ones are just well-dressed fear. A useful test: does this requirement describe something about how we'd actually function together, day to day, in conflict, in values, in how we each show up for connection? Or does it describe a trait that's easy to screen for and conveniently eliminates almost everyone before you'd ever have to find out?

Attachment pattern in particular is worth sitting with honestly. Someone whose own attachment style skews avoidant is often the person building the most elaborate moat, not because their standards are unusually high, but because the moat is doing exactly the job avoidance always does, keeping the drawbridge up long enough that closeness never becomes a live possibility [2]. Recognizing that pattern in yourself is uncomfortable. It's also the only way to actually start filtering for real compatibility instead of manufactured safety.

A quick, honest checklist for your own list

Before writing off another list of requirements as just "knowing what you want," it's worth running each item through a short filter. Does this requirement describe something about daily compatibility, how you'd handle a disagreement, whether your long-term visions actually line up, how you each show affection and connection? Keep it. Does it describe a trait that's easy to screen for on a profile and conveniently rules out the majority of people before a conversation even starts, an exact height, a specific job title, a hobby that has nothing to do with how you'd actually get along? That's worth a second look.

None of this means abandoning real preferences. Wanting someone who shares your values around family, or who communicates directly instead of stonewalling during conflict, is a legitimate standard with real predictive weight behind it. The difference shows up in how the requirement functions. A real standard narrows the field toward people you'd actually be compatible with. A moat narrows the field toward nobody, on purpose, without ever having to admit that's the goal.

What happens when two moat-builders match anyway

There's a specific, recognizable version of this that plays out constantly in modern dating: two people, each running their own version of the drawbridge-and-crocodile-moat defense, somehow end up on a date together anyway, usually because the algorithm or the room forced a match neither person's usual filters would have allowed. What typically happens next is a strange, mutual, unspoken standoff. Neither person leans in first, because leaning in first means being the one who risked something. Both walk away describing it as "no spark," when what actually happened was two well-defended people successfully avoiding finding out if there was one.

This is part of why in-person, structured environments change the dynamic in a way apps rarely do. It's much harder to maintain a moat in real time, across a table, with a live conversation happening, than it is across a screen where you can simply stop responding. The moat depends on distance to function. Close the distance, and it takes real, active effort to keep the drawbridge up, effort that's usually more visible, and more uncomfortable to sustain, than most people expect.

Bringing the moat down at an actual event

Here's the practical version of all of this. At a Beyond The Sparks event, the filtering already happened before anyone walked in. Every guest took the SPARK Quiz, sorted across the five dimensions that actually predict whether two people function well together. That means you can't quietly hide behind an arbitrary technicality when you're standing across from someone the quiz has already told you shares real compatibility with you, on the dimensions that matter. The excuse-making the moat depends on gets a lot harder to sustain in person, with real information, in front of an actual human being instead of a profile you can dismiss with one swipe.

That's not a promise the moat disappears entirely. Old patterns don't vanish because a quiz says you're compatible with someone. But it does remove the easiest version of the excuse, the one where you never even had to find out whether the connection was real, because the list disqualified them before you ever gave it a chance.

It also removes a quieter, second excuse: the belief that you simply haven't met the right person yet, so there's no urgency to examine whether the list itself is the obstacle. When the room is full of people who've already cleared the bar that actually matters, and the usual excuses stop applying, what's left is a much more honest question. Not "is this person good enough," but "am I actually willing to let someone in."

Why this piece struck a nerve

Part of why David's essay traveled as far as it did is that it named something a lot of people recognize in themselves but rarely say out loud. Nobody wants to admit their standards might be fear in a nice shirt. It's much easier to keep believing the list is just discerning, that the last several people who didn't work out were genuinely deficient in some measurable way, than to sit with the harder possibility that the list itself was built to keep everyone out.

That discomfort is exactly why the piece is worth taking seriously instead of dismissing as internet cynicism. A list built entirely from painful past experience isn't irrational. It's a completely understandable response to getting hurt. The problem isn't that the list exists. It's that most people never go back and separate the parts of the list that are actually protective from the parts that just feel protective while quietly guaranteeing the outcome stays the same: nobody gets close enough to test whether this time might be different.

None of this requires believing in love at first sight, or pretending compatibility is guaranteed just because a quiz says so. It just requires being honest about which of your own requirements are actually load-bearing, and which ones have been quietly doing a different job the whole time.

Take the SPARK Quiz at beyondthesparks.com. It's built around the five things that actually predict whether a relationship works, not the ones that are just easy to measure and easier to hide behind.

We'll see you at Cabin Boys, at Chicken N Pickle, or in Dallas this September.

Sources

1. Noah David, "What the F*ck Do We Actually Want? Love, Apparently. Just Without Any of the F*cking Risk," Elephant Journal, August 2026. https://www.elephantjournal.com/2026/08/what-the-fck-do-we-actually-want-love-apparently-just-without-any-of-the-fcking-risk-noah-david/

2. Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-30882-001

3. Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995

4. Beyond The Sparks, "We Think Real Matchmaking Shouldn't Cost $50,000." https://beyondthesparks.com/blog/matchmaking-affordability