This Should Be Your Deal-Breaker

It’s easy to get hung up on obvious deal-breakers that range from shallow to significant. I won’t be with someone who looks this way or that way, who thinks this thing or that thing, who follows this belief or that belief.

We make these lists and come up with these ideals to simplify things. There are so many people available to date, but that doesn’t mean we have time to date all of them, or even want to date all of them. You have to narrow it down somehow, and standards, petty or otherwise, help that process.

But the problem with how someone looks on paper is that no living, breathing human being exists on paper. They exist in real life, and real people are more than a list of physical qualities.
You deserve someone who appreciates you.

Not someone who appreciates the idea of you. Not someone who appreciates who you could become, even if you’re not there yet. Someone who appreciates you as you are, right here, right now, in this moment, despite your flaws.

Compromise doesn’t mean dating an artist when you’d rather date a doctor. Compromise means dating someone who won’t compromise: someone who sees your character as a problem, not an asset. These people, the people not interested in meeting you halfway but insist that you meet them all the way, the people who want to see themselves in you instead of seeing you in you—these are the people that make you compromise. They may not make you compromise your morals and they may not make you compromise your standards, but what they ask of you is far worse: they demand that you compromise your spirit, your personality, those elements of you that will never appear on any dating profile because it goes far beyond your likes and dislikes or interests and disinterests. They demand that you compromise yourself.

You deserve someone who appreciates you.

Someone who challenges you, yes. Someone who inspires you to grow, yes. But not someone who can only be with you if you change who you are at your core. Not someone who forces your square into his or her circle. Not someone who labels your differences as a roadblock instead of a complement.

You deserve someone who appreciates you.

That should be your deal-breaker.