Many women and men pride themselves in having high standards. What a shame. In any case it’s one of the cheapest attributes to have

To have a high standard, all you have to do is to WANT things from other people. It’s not bad to want things. Arguably babies have the highest standards, they just want everything.

Having high standards says nothing about having any value. More often than not, having high standards screams insecurity. It’s largely a defence mechanism. It often means you have a low value.

I know this is counter intuitive but I’ll show you the healthy way. First let’s see the unhealthy way, let me draw this parallel:

Having high standard is often closely related to setting boundaries. They call it setting healthy boundaries. You tell someone what you want them to do or not do, be it your friends , your child, your partner, who ever. You demand. And that’s healthy right?

Wrong

The way to set healthy boundaries is to communicate what you will do when someone does whatever they want to do. That applies to your partner, your date, your child, whatever. It’s not loud, it’s not entitlement, you are not waiting for someone to do something, you are being something.

You can have absolutely no value and yet have a high standard. Claiming to have a high standard is a terrible proxy for projecting value.

It’s a cheap way to cover your insecurities. You are a human being, no more special than anyone else.

To legitimately have a high standard in the manner that you say, has to be paired up with you yourself being able to meet those standards one for one.

You get no credit for existing the way you are, as a woman or as a man. If you did nothing to make yourself one, you get no credit for it.

Drop your high standards. Be of value instead. Come down from your high pedestals. Remember that you are just human, the same liver and kidney etc you are made up of is exactly what chickens and cows are made up of. You don’t get to live forever, you are just human.

This is a long wounded prescriptive contrarian take, with a few tangents here and there, likely a few typos, no time to reread, but the real message is to not be deceived thinking that saying you have a high standard somehow means you have value. You’re better off not announcing it, or even worse saying yours is higher than someone else’s.

Switch the language to “I have a high value” so the question of “what are they” produces a very different answer than what “I have a high standard” does