I’ve been trying to set one of my friends up for over a decade.
She’s amazing and funny and smart, the kind of person you’d think anyone would be lucky to land, and every year or two, I’m sure I’ve found him.
And every time, she’ll agree to the dinner, go, and come back with a clean, almost lawyerly summary of why it could never have worked.
I believed her for years. She just had high standards, and who argues with high standards?
Then I noticed that the reasons kept changing, but the answer never did. No one ever quite cleared the bar. And the bar, it turned out, was never really about the men. Once I saw it in her, I started seeing it in a whole type of person — the ones who will tell you, with complete sincerity, that they’re just very selective and have high standards. It’s not that. Here’s what tends to be going on underneath.
“High standards” is the most respectable name you can give a wall
Of all the ways to keep people at a distance, “I have high standards” might be the most ingenious, because it doesn’t sound like distance at all. It sounds like self-respect. It sounds like someone who knows their worth and refuses to waste time on anything less.
And that’s the genius of it. No one can argue with it — not their friends, not their family, not even the person saying it.
Tell people you’re frightened of being hurt, and they’ll move in to help.
Tell them you have standards, and they’ll admire you sticking to them.
The wall gets to stand in plain sight, repainted as a virtue. It even works from the inside: you get to feel like a person with taste and self-worth, which is a far more comfortable thing to be than a person who’s scared.
But there’s a tell. Real standards work like a filter — most things don’t make it through, but some do. This kind lets nothing through.
There is always, always a reason, and it usually shows up after the fact, reverse-engineered to fit a “no” that was decided before the date even started. He was lovely, but something was missing. She looked perfect on paper, but there was no spark. Too eager, too aloof, too available, too intense, not enough.
My friend once wrote off a perfectly kind man over the way he ordered at restaurants.
The specific reason is never the point, which is exactly why it can be anything. The point is that the list is endless and silently restocks itself, so that no real, breathing, imperfect human being could ever fully satisfy it. That isn’t a high bar. A high bar can still be cleared. This is a bar engineered to stay just out of reach — though the person holding it would be startled to hear it described that way.
The closer someone gets, the more wrong they turn out to be
When someone is safely out of reach — unavailable, far away, already attached, purely theoretical — they can be wonderful. Perfect, even. The standards go quiet because nothing is actually at stake. It’s the moment someone available and interested and right there in front of them appears that the flaws begin to multiply.
It could look like discernment. But it’s a little closer to a smoke alarm going off.
Psychologists talk about what they call deactivating strategies — the moves people make, mostly without noticing, to turn down the volume on their own need for closeness when intimacy starts to feel like too much. Hunting for a partner’s faults is one of the most reliable ones. The more real a connection gets, the harder the mind works to find what’s wrong with it, because spotting the flaw grants permission to step back.
So the criticism is often just a clock. Pay attention to when the disqualifying reasons arrive. Not when someone is cold, or careless, or unkind — that would be ordinary good judgment. They arrive right around the moment things might get real: the second date that went a little too well, the message that landed with more weight than expected, the point where the next step would mean being slightly more known than is comfortable. The standards don’t rise because the candidate got worse. They rise because the danger got closer.
More Bolde Stories
It was built, not born, and it goes back further than one bad relationship
For a lot of people, it starts in childhood — with a parent whose warmth ran hot and cold, whose approval you might have one day and lose the next for reasons you could never quite predict or earn back.
Avoidant patterns tend to take shape early, when a child learns that the people who are supposed to be a sure thing simply aren’t — that needing someone, or letting it show, is a fast route to being disappointed. A kid living in that uncertainty absorbs a simple, durable rule: depend on no one, want nothing out loud, and you can’t be let down. Self-reliance becomes a synonym for safety. Closeness becomes the thing that gets you hurt.
Then adulthood hands over its own evidence. Someone got in once — all the way in — and it ended badly, the way the child always suspected it would, and the old lesson got a fresh coat of proof. After that, “high standards” stop being about pickiness and become an entire structure. And it all but guarantees no one will ever get near enough to do that kind of damage again.
Being on the other side of those standards is its own kind of hard
Anyone who gets close to a person like this describes the same uneasy feeling:
They start feeling like a candidate under review — performing a little, auditioning a little, never quite able to relax into it, because somewhere a tally is being kept. And somehow they keep landing just short, in ways no one will ever name out loud.
They try harder. They smooth down the parts of themselves that might be the problem. They read the small withdrawals as something to fix in themselves rather than a wall doing its job, and they keep working to clear a bar that, slowly, they come to understand was never going to move within reach. It’s a particular kind of loneliness, being held at arm’s length by someone who insists the distance is about your flaws.
And eventually, most of them give up. Not in anger, as a rule — in exhaustion. The interested ones drift off. The friends who used to suggest and hope and play matchmaker go quiet too, because there are only so many times a person can watch someone explain away something good before they stop bringing good things around.
The wall does its work not with one dramatic shove, but by slowly making it not worth the effort to stay.
Which leaves the one with the “standards” more or less where it was always going to leave them: alone, and calling it a choice.
“I’d rather be on my own than settle.” And maybe, on some level, that’s even true. But it’s a gentler story to tell than the real one — that at some point, being alone started to feel safer than being known, and the standards were only ever the way to keep it that way.
