The Dating Pool Isn’t Small. You Just Don’t Like What’s In It.

People love to say the dating pool is awful.

And that’s true if you live in Scottsdale, Arizona. But I’m starting to think the problem isn’t that there are no good options. It’s that we want a combination of qualities that rarely coexist in one person because many of those qualities naturally compete with one another.

We want someone wildly successful but always available.
Ambitious but fully present.
Confident but not arrogant.
Attractive but not overly aware of it.
Independent but constantly reassuring.
Sexy but safe.
Reckless enough to be exciting, responsible enough to make it home.
Protective but not controlling. Desire Without the Risk
Dangerous but not to me.

And that person may exist. But they’re probably looking for someone equally exceptional.

The dating pool gets smaller every time we insist that our partner fulfill every need we have.

Every trait comes with a trade-off. The highly successful person probably has a demanding career, limited free time, and a phone that gets more attention than you. The emotionally intelligent person has emotional needs of their own. Which sounds great until they start having them. The calm, stable person feels less exciting than the person who sends your nervous system into cardiac arrest. And the person who checks every box on paper isn’t always the person you can’t stop thinking about.

Experience teaches us what we don’t want much faster than it teaches us what we want. What we want is often a combination of hope, projection, fantasy, and a few people we never fully got over.

I say that like it’s an observation about people. It’s also a confession.

Dating requires vulnerability, effort, time, and emotional risk. None of that bothers me nearly as much as a get-ready process that takes longer than the actual date.

My dating pool isn’t small. I just eliminate people quickly. I can usually tell within one second of looking at you and two minutes of talking to you whether I’m interested or planning my exit strategy.

But when I’m interested, I zero in. I put all my eggs in one basket and let you think you’re competing with several others.

I’ve already imagined a future. A relationship. Matching luggage. My name on his Amex. Next thing I know, I’m attached to the fantasy instead of the person actively contradicting it.

Red flags become things to keep an eye on. Incompatibilities become, “Maybe it’ll be different next time.” An opinion that survives solely because I want it to. Potential becomes a full-time job. It’s exhausting whether you’re dating it or asking someone to keep believing in yours.

At 28, people told me to raise my standards and not settle. At 38, they tell me to keep an open mind, date outside my type, maybe attraction will grow. So I did. But after enough dates, I’ve learned that one martini can do a lot of things. Creating attraction isn’t one of them.

Three martinis, however, can temporarily transform a man into some combination of Chuck Bass, Pacey Witter, and Prince Charming. Which, if you know those characters, tells you everything you need to know about how contradictory our expectations can be.

The martinis wear off. Expectations don’t.

We want the bad boy with hidden depth, the emotionally available best friend, and the fairy-tale ending, all wrapped into one person who arrives at the exact moment we’re ready.

Then when no one fits perfectly, we conclude that dating is broken. But every strength comes attached to a limitation.

The older I get, the more I think dating is hard because it requires something most of us don’t naturally want to do: See people for who they are. Not their potential. Not who we hope they are. Not who we’d like them to be. Who they actually are.

I guess you can’t have it all. And if you do, I’d like the names of your therapist, psychic, and whatever higher power you’re working with.

Sometimes the dating pool feels small, not because there are no good people left. But because we’re searching for someone who doesn’t exist.

To be clear, I never said the dating pool wasn’t catastrophic. I just said it wasn’t small.

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