What Should You Look For In a Guy?

I never insisted on a man who checked all the boxes. But once I saw myself as someone who deserved to be picky, the whole world changed...

- Heather Havrilesky

My friend Naina told me when we were both in our late twenties, “A guy can either pledge his undying love to me or hit the road.”

“But it takes forever for men to tell you how they feel.” I insisted in confusion. At the time, I had been dating my boyfriend for nine months, but he still hadn’t told me he loved me. He did say, repeatedly, that he just didn’t believe in marriage. As tired as I was of waiting for him to take our relationship seriously, I trusted that he’d grow up sooner or later. “I am not going out with anyone who makes less than 30L,” my friend Saira told me a few years later.

“That’s absurd!” I said.

At the point, I was living with a perpetually unemployed stoner. As tired as I was of bearing that my boyfriend wouldn’t even consider settling down until his career was more established, I simply couldn’t imagine kicking him to the curb based on his income tax bracket alone. But after the relationship ended, the fourth in a string of romantic failures, I could see that whatever I was doing, it wasn’t working. But instead of questioning my selection criteria, I just assumed there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was too emotional or needy. Maybe I needed to talk things through too much. Somehow, even though I had never used any selection criteria beyond attraction in choosing guys to date, I was the one who didn’t check all the boxes. “Make a list,” my mother’s best friend, Janvi, told me one day when I was visiting my family home. She pressed a finger into the table to really emphasise her point. “Write down the traits you can’t live without. If a guy doesn’t have everything you want, don’t even think about dating him.”