Women have this very regimental habit of creating lists when they are trying to figure out what they want in the perfect partner. He needs to be this and he needs to be that, and while I do actively promote setting your own personal standards about what you want from a guy and a relationship, they need to realistic and relevant.
We do tend to get carried away and start to list points or traits that are superficial, shallow and that say absolutely nothing about how compatible a guy is with you.
In my opinion, there are only ever 3 things you need to make sure a guy has to a certain ‘standard’ to be worth your time. And these 3 things work for every woman, even taking into account personal preference.
A is for Attractiveness
We need to find someone attractive to be drawn to them, but this isn’t just physical.
Physical attraction is just one small part of a person that makes up a whole, and it says absolutely nothing about how compatible someone can be with you in a relationship.
As the well know phrase states, ‘’beauty is in the eye of the beholder’’ so physical attraction has a different meaning for everyone. It can be the smallest thing such as a smile, a laugh, the way they walk or carry themselves. A twinkle in their eye or even their smell that pulls us in initially, but it’s not what is going to keep us there.
There needs to be an intellectual and emotional element to it as well. They need to be able to stimulate your mind and evoke your emotions. When all of these things work together you will find the connection you feel is so much stronger and more importantly, it’s sustainable.
A guy can be a 10/10 in the looks department but there may not be enough going on mentally to stimulate your mind. Especially if you are the kind of woman who, like me, needs deep and charged conversations about subjects like philosophy and politics in order to find someone attractive enough to want to develop intimacy.
You will probably even find that someone who wasn’t instantly physically attractive to you suddenly becomes irresistible, or that someone who was instantly hot, is now not so hot!
So, in short, there needs to be a balance between all of these factors in order achieve real and genuine attraction. There needs to be the ability to build a foundation after the initial lust phase of the relationship (commonly called the honeymoon period) dissipates. The only way to do this is to make sure that you connect on all levels of attraction.
P is for Personality
Personality is key to the longevity of any relationship because it ensures compatibility. It isn’t necessarily that you have to be exactly alike in order to be compatible, but your general characters have to be aligned. If you have a different sense of humour, goals, lifestyles, or outlooks and views on life, the likelihood of the relationship working is relatively low.
I know we all seem to have the romanticised idea that opposites attract but I really don’t believe that. What we see as opposite is really just a few personal preferences or sometimes a physical disparity. One of you is a heavy metal lover and the other likes rap music, or one of you is outgoing and talkative and the other is shy and reserved. These are small things, nothing that can’t be worked on during the course of a relationship and mitigated into an understanding of how one another works.
If two people are fundamentally different however, and their personalities are the complete opposite of one another, then meeting in the middle is going to be extremely difficult. Having a different sense of humour for example, where you completely misinterpret everything about others jokes and banter, will just cause friction. Or if your opinion on the defining factors in life are at different ends of the spectrum, like how you approach and see life, you are going to clash at every point.
All relationships take effort and certain adjustments, but if you have to change your entire personality to suit someone else or meet someone half way on every little detail will it eventually lead to stress and frustration. Fast forward this 5 years, and that stress and frustration has turned into resentment.
It’s really important to spend the time to get to know someone before a relationship gets too serious so you can figure out how compatible your personalities are. Remember, you can fall in love with someone that’s not right for you, it happens all the time. But it’s never going to be a happy stable relationship because too many differences can cause too many problems when emotions are involved.
B is for Behaviour
This third point is ultimately the most important, because behaviour will determine how he treats you, and it isn’t something that is necessarily connected to or correlates with the other points in this Wise Guide.
I hear women say all the time ‘But he has such a great personality’ when they are trying to justify a guy’s unfair and negative behaviour towards them. Thinking that a seemingly good personality equals good behaviour is the BIGGEST mistake that women make when seeking out a partner. They end up putting up with treatment that they wouldn’t normally stand for because ‘He is such a fun guy’.
If we are going to be crude here and rate each point of out 10, then while you can take varying degrees of scores for Attractiveness and Personality, behaviour has to be a 10/10 every time.
A man’s behaviour towards you and others, and towards life and its up’s and downs is key to any relationship. It’s how he reacts to stress, how he deals with his emotions, how he holds you in his perspective, so if he values you in his decisions or if you and your feelings always dismissed. It’s how much time and effort he invests in you and it’s his honesty and intentions towards you.
I think the most crucial factor here is how he deals with his feelings when he is stressed or angry. How someone reacts to these situations can say a lot about a their emotionally maturity, how well they deal with their emotions when they are upset. Does he flip out at you when something goes wrong and blames you for it, does his temper got from 0-10 in about 5 seconds?
When it comes to how he treats and acts towards you, don’t tolerate indecisiveness, emotional instability or lack of interest when you are apart.
Modern men are getting a bit of a reputation for being ‘fuck boi’s’, because of this pick you up and put you down when they feel like it attitudes we seem to encounter. It is the Netflix and chill generation at its worst.
And while I 100% believe that there are plenty of men out there who aren’t like this, and do know how to treat women, we need to stop giving our time and effort to the ones that don’t.
Why does he think he can send you a cheeky text after ignoring you for 3 weeks? Because we allow it. Because there are women out there who respond to that behaviour. A guy calls and they go running, so it gives the message that this behaviour is okay because we accept it as normal. And why do they act so hurt and amazed when they meet a woman who doesn’t allow herself to be treated this way? Because they aren’t used to it.
I would bet money on the fact that if every woman set their standards high and only gave time to the guys who also give their time to them in return, we would have a behavioural revolution in men. We would leave these guy’s scratching their heads and probably leading them to the realisation that this is not okay, and that in order to get anywhere with a woman they’re going to have to start rethinking their behaviour.
If you want to know how to communicate to a guy on what kind of behaviour is acceptable to you, stay tuned by subscribing to my blog and accessing the members only area where Elle’s Wise Guides will be published soon!
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