There’s nothing wrong with high standards, but it’s important to be clear on what they are.

Standards worth having include wanting someone who’ll treat you well, who’ll be into you, who’ll be clear about what they want. You can make up your own list about the way you’d like someone to act towards you in a relationship.

Standards that aren’t so helpful are ‘must be blonde, over a certain height and around a certain weight with a specific vital statistics’. Often we’re encouraged to look for a particular ‘type’ of person based on looks, income, education, occupation that means we may be missing meeting all kinds of other people.

Only you know whether you’re using standards as a defence mechanism. If you aren’t giving people much of a chance or only picking people based on looks it might be an idea to avoid dating for a while whilst you work out what’s driving your behaviour.

If it’s a case that you have a few dates, but realise the person isn’t really what you’re into long term then it might just be a case of keeping on looking.