12 Signs Your Expectations For Love Are Too Damn High

1. You hold other people to standards that you don’t meet yourself.

You want someone who’s well traveled, financially secure and in possession of abs that one could grate cheese on. But you fit none of those requirements yourself. You want your partner to meet a long list of expectations, but you’d be direly offended to find that they have a list of expectations for you.

2. You want someone who takes initiative – but you never take it yourself.

You want someone who texts back promptly, plans exciting dates and goes out of their way to make you happy – but you aren’t willing to do any of those things for them. At least, not until they go out of their way first. You want to receive first, give second.

3. You’re exclusively interested in people who are ‘hard to get.’

You aren’t interested in the people who are interested in you – you want only the unattainable ones; the ones who seem like a challenge. This is a classic sign that you aren’t interested in actual love – you’re only interested in boosting your ego by attaining people you perceive to be out of your league.

4. If they don’t sweep you off your feet right away, you don’t give them a second chance.

You expect instant fireworks when you meet someone – and if they aren’t there right away, you don’t bother sticking around to see what might develop with time. You expect love to happen like it does in the movies – at first sight or not at all.

5. You have a list of superficial deal breakers.

You don’t give much thought to what you want in terms of personality, but you have a long list of physical qualities that you flat-out refuse to compromise on. If the love of your life is 5’9”, he’s not the love of your life.

6. You get angry with partners for not reacting to you the way you planned for them to react in your head.

You regularly get frustrated by the fact that your IRL relationship isn’t measuring up to the relationship you’d imagined in your head. You want your partner to be a mind reader and you aren’t willing to communicate what you actually want to them – you expect them to just know.

7. You’re looking for someone to complete you.

Rather than finding someone who adds to your life, you’re looking for someone to fill a void in it. You aren’t happy alone and you think that a relationship is the answer to all of your problems.

8. Your expectations for love haven’t changed over the years.

Even after watching a few relationships fail, you haven’t learned all that much about what it takes to make a relationship work. You still expect the Disney-movie kind of love you dreamt about as a child – and you consider anything less than that ‘settling.’

9. You expect to find a lover who can give you it all.

You want a partner who is both your best friend and your biggest challenger. The yin to your yang but also your partner in crime. You haven’t yet realized that every relationship has a unique dynamic – but you have to pick which dynamic you want. You cannot have them all in one person.

10. You spend more time ‘inventing’ your partner than you do listening to them.

You love fantasizing about your partner and how perfect they are – but you aren’t all that concerned about whether those fantasies match up with reality. If you’re being honest, you prefer the version of them you have in your mind – and you’re annoyed when their reality contradicts it.

11. You only recognize love in the exact way that you give it out.

You want to receive love in the exact same way as you give it. You let the everyday favors, errands and gestures of affection that your partner does for you go unappreciated, because they’re not your chosen method of expressing love.

12. You aren’t willing to take a chance on love.

Before going out on a limb for someone, you want to be 100% sure of their feelings for you. You’re only willing to invest when the stakes are low and the odds are tipped in your favor. The idea of putting yourself out there and possibly getting rejected is not one that you’re willing to consider. Even if it’s the exact thing that could lead to love that lasts.