Nobody likes the word picky. Picky suggests that there's something wrong with you, that if you
didn't have such high standards, you'd already be married by now. Picky sounds like your fault.
So, let's get away from the word picky. Today's Love U podcast is not going to tell you whether
you're too picky. It will instead let you know whether your choices are effectively
helping you get the relationship that you want. We're keeping you away from it. Stick around.
I'm Evan Marc Katz, dating coach for smart, strong, successful women and your personal
trainer for love. Welcome to the Love U podcast. Keep listening to learn how you can know for
certain if your standards are realistic when it comes to choosing a partner. And when we're done,
I’ll let you know how you can apply to love you to create a passionate relationship in
which you feel safe, heard and understood. So, I know you've heard this joke before, but
it's worth telling anyway. And it's not a ha ha joke. So, don't expect a ha ha moment out of it.
This opened my friend Lori Gottlieb's book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough
back in 2010. And I circled back and found it on the Internet. So, without further ado,
there's a store that sells new husbands and it just opened. Among the
instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates. You may visit the store
only once. There are six floors and the attribute of the men increases. The shopper ascends
the flights. There is, however, a catch. You may choose any man from a particular floor,
or you may choose to go up a floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building.
So, a woman goes to the husband's store to find a husband on each floor. The door is read.
Floor number one, these men have jobs. Floor number two. These men have jobs and love
kids. Floor number three, these men have jobs, love kids and are extremely good looking.
“Wow!” The woman thinks but feels compelled to keep going. She goes to the fourth floor and
reads floor number four. These men have jobs, love kids, are drop dead good-looking and also help out
with the housework. “Oh, mercy me!” She exclaims, “I could hardly stand it!” Still, she goes to the
fifth floor and the sign reads. These men have a job, love kids, are drop dead gorgeous, help with
the housework and have a strong romantic streak. She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the
sixth floor and the sign reads. You are a visitor, three billion two hundred sixty-one million
four-hundred and ninety-six thousand and twelve to this floor. There are no men on this floor.
This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at
the husband’s store. So, here's the thing about that joke. It's actually quite unfair to women.
It is since women are the butt of the joke. I have to make it really clear that although I see the
humor in it, it's if you're going to make fun of someone, you should hit the target properly. So,
that is the joke as it's written. My husband's store, the one we're gonna talk about today,
doesn't mention jobs because that's important or loving kids,
because that's important or helping with the housework, because that's important.
These are all important things you need to have in a man. So, to suggest that a
woman is ridiculous for holding on for them is untrue and unfair. That doesn't make you picky.
My husband's story goes a little something like this and see if you can climb up the stairs with
me. My husband's first starts with looks. So, I ask you, we're gonna use real pseudo math today.
I ask you what percentage of men are decent looking when you scroll through a dating site?
OK, Cupid says statistics suggest that women think about twenty percent of men are cute
and eighty percent are not. My history as a dating and relationship coach suggests the
number is closer to five to ten percent. But let's start with twenty percent of men are eligible.
Eighty percent of men have been lopped off on the first floor of the husband's store just on looks
alone. Next, we go to floor number two. And my husband's store, floor number two, says education.
Almost all of my clients are college educated. A good percentage have master's doctorates.
So, what percentage of men qualified by those standards to have the education that you have
and then some. Well, do a quick Google search like I did. Thirty five percent of men have
college degrees. That ten percent have master's. Floor number three of my husband's store has
income listed on it, virtually all of my clients make over fifty thousand dollars a
year and also want to date men who make more than they do. So, what percentage of men,
for example, make a hundred thousand dollars? The answer is around ten percent. Two hundred
thousand dollars. You could chop that in half. The fourth floor of the husband’s store.
We've gone from looks to education to income. Now, we're on the fourth floor and now we're looking at
height. That's what's available in this store. The average height of a woman is five foot four. But
some women are taller than that. And some women prefer taller men. We're entitled to that. Just
know the percentage of men who's over six feet tall is fourteen percent. Eighty-six percent of
men are not six feet tall. And we can keep going to floor number five, where you might find
race, religion or politics, and discover that if you're Indian, you're looking for one percent of
the population. If you're Jewish, you're looking for one-point seven percent of the population.
If you're far left progressive, you're looking at eight percent of the population.
But you get the idea of what happens at my husband's store. And so, what we do is
multiply those numbers together because a person has to have all of those qualities for you to
feel like you're not settling right. So, if we just use the numbers that we mentioned earlier,
these are not my numbers. These are the real numbers, twenty percent times,
thirty-five percent times ten percent, fourteen percent times one percent. Do you know what you
get? Point zero zero zero zero zero one percent of men are qualified to date you. And that's before.
Two really important qualities that we haven't considered yet. Number one, whether he's
capable of making you happy for the next forty years, whether he has the requisite kindness,
consistency, communication and character to be a good husband, whether he has anger issues,
whether he has addiction issues, whether he has honesty issues, whether he's good and dead,
whether he speaks your love language, whether he respects your opinion and tries to make you happy,
that hasn't shown up in the husband's store. And we're already at a point, oh, one percent of men.
But we haven't talked about that stuff yet. And the other thing the husband still doesn't
account for is whether that point, oh, one percent of men is interested in you,
or whether he wants to climb higher in his own wife's store. So, when you add it all up, it's
not a matter of most people's standards being too high. It's a matter of your standards being skewed
for external qualities in which your ideal husband must be taller, smarter and richer than you. Well,
how he treats you is almost secondary. You can see why this is a problem, right?
So, as always, I'm not saying it's wrong for preferring fit to fat, tall to short,
rich to poor, educated to uneducated and so on. When you turn everything into this false binary,
men or either one or the other, you completely destroy your own dating pool. And I can completely
empathize because I dated the exact same way when I was single from twenty-five to thirty-five.
I was looking for women who are as smart as I was, more sophisticated and well-read than I was, more
attractive and fit than I was. And someone who thought the same way that I did about what I felt
was important, someone who was really ambitious, someone who was really intense, someone who was
into personal growth and self-help, someone who is very well ahead, well-read, very liberal, secular.
I spent ten years going out with three-hundred different women who had a combination of those
qualities because that's what I was attracted to and that's what I felt that I deserved.
That's what I thought was most important. And the only way I discovered my own blind spot
and learned to adjust my standards was through coaching women through the same process, and
realizing I wasn't following my own advice. I was trying to get to floor six of the wife's store,
and it wasn't really effective in helping me get happy. No more than it's been effective
in helping you get happy, focusing on what we say in the store? Higher education, income looks. So,
I learned to trust my feelings. We talked about this a lot and the Love U podcast. My feelings,
instead of my intellect, I tried dating people who didn't fit my original picture.
I discovered that the more dates that I had, the more I expanded my palate. I discovered different
flavors that I liked, so to speak, when it came to dating. And after about two years of trial
and error and failure, two years after I had this revelation that I was dating improperly,
ineffectively, I ended up finding my soulmate. And as anyone who's followed me for a while knows
my soul mate. My wife didn't have most of the things that were on my original list
that were on me, my wife's store. She wasn't ambitious. She wasn't a six-figure earner. She
didn't have a master's degree. She wasn't Jewish. She wasn't an atheist. She wasn't going to hand
me books to read or tell me self-help classes to take or recommend cool new bands.
But, she was the happiest person I've ever met. The most generous person I ever met.
The most likable person I ever met. And we got along famously,
even though she didn't check all my original boxes from that waste store checklist.
I couldn't feel any luckier at how, after all of this trial and error that I made
three hundred dates, any illusion that I had that I was holding out for someone
just like me but better, I ended up in the most rock-solid marriage of anybody, you know. And I
ended up with my best friend. That's why I am so evangelical about this kind of stuff. That's why I
pound this message home so much on YouTube, on my podcast. And that's why this is my life's mission,
to take women like you through Love U, so you can feel just as lucky as I do. And you could be as
annoying and evangelical as I am about what it's like to have a happy marriage. So, I'm well aware
when you listen to this, you hear me telling you something that I'm not saying, which is to settle.
Even the wife never said anything of the sort, you settled before. you swore you'd never do it again.
But remember, I am not telling you to marry a man who doesn't have a job,
and who you have to support like his mommy. I'm telling you, it's okay to marry a man
who makes less money the same way it's OK for a man to marry a woman who makes less money.
I'm not telling you to marry a man you're not attracted to and go the rest of your
life without desire or good sex. I'm telling you that attraction and good sex are not necessarily
a great predictor of your future happiness. And as long as he's attractive to you and pleases
you in bed, he doesn't have to be the hottest guy you've ever seen. I'm not telling you to go out
some stupid man who can't carry on a conversation with you. I'm telling you that there's many kinds
of intelligence in that conventional education isn't nearly as important as
emotional intelligence when it comes to marriage. So, are you too picky? Are your standards too
high? Are you going to be alone forever if you don't compromise? It is not my place to say.
But I will tell you that if you're holding out for a man who is taller, smarter, richer, cuter
and funnier than you, and if that's less than one percent of all men before we consider whether is a
good partner, and whether he's equally interested in you, then perhaps your current criteria are
ineffective in searching for a husband. And if you want to know how to do it right, and make
smart relationship choices for the rest of your life that actively make you happy in the long run,
this is exactly what I help you do in Love U. My name is Evan Marc Katz. Thank you for tuning
into the Love You podcast. For more episodes like this on YouTube, click the subscribe button and
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the link below and apply for coaching and love you. Thank you so much. I'll talk to you soon.