There’s a “high value” label being plastered everywhere in modern dating.
Somehow, high value has been confused with high standards.
Many women are putting up difficult relationship behaviour and calling it high value.
There’s a vast difference between knowing your worth and making someone struggle to love you.
6 Signs You’re Hard To Love And Not High Value
1. You Expect Him To Read Your Mind
A man being attracted to you doesn’t make him telepathic.
He can’t sense your needs if you never say them out loud.
You might have been dropping hints here and there, but hints are easy to miss, especially for someone whose mind works differently from yours.
“If you love me, you’ll know what I need” is not a fair measure of love.
It baffles me that women like this get upset when expectations they never spoke about aren’t met.
Attentiveness is different from mind reading.
Yes, a man who loves you will notice things and sometimes do them before you ask.
But when you make that the standard for everything, you become very difficult to love.
You’ll always have an issue with the things he isn’t doing, simply because you never said them, even though he might have happily done them.
He also has needs you don’t know about, because he hasn’t told you either.
When all your focus is on what he failed to guess, you start believing he’s not worthy of you or not meeting the standard you set in your head.
You end up creating a problem that started with you, then making it his problem.
Say what you need clearly, and give him the chance to show up.
Expecting him to read your mind makes you hard to love, and no high-value label will change that.
2. You Confuse Being Difficult To Access With Being Valuable
There’s a misconception, especially among ladies, that withholding attention makes you more desirable.
It’s usually built on the idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Please, sis, absence will get you forgotten quickly too.
Playing games with your communication and affection might feel powerful at first.
When he figures out what you’re doing, he’ll feel like a fool, and nobody wants to be with someone who plays with their feelings.
Believing a man must chase you to prove his interest is so old-fashioned.
People in this generation have too much to deal with to keep figuring out why they haven’t heard from you or what you’re up to this time.
You forget that communication is what breeds fondness.
Emotional unavailability is very different from emotional independence, and you need to understand this well.
An emotionally independent woman has her own life and her own peace, and she still shows up warmly for her man.
An emotionally unavailable woman keeps him at arm’s length until she can’t even tell where his interest lies anymore.
At the end of the day, you’ll be the one who ends up playing yourself.
When a man sees a woman who pays attention to him and is emotionally available, he pitches his tent there.
Do yourself a favour and stop mistaking distance for value.
3. You Always Need To Win An Argument
There was a time in my marriage when I saw every conversation as an argument that needed to be won.
My husband called my attention to it, and I thought he was exaggerating because I’m a lawyer.
Then my brother said the same thing, and I felt he was exaggerating too, because it seemed to me that nobody was listening to me.
Then a friend pointed out the same thing, at a completely different time.
I told myself that three people couldn’t be lying against me.
That took me back, and I started paying attention to how I sounded.
Why does this always sound like this?
I was constantly treating points as things to prove or disprove, validate or invalidate.
When someone felt wronged by something I did, I would explain and rationalize my reasons, and of course those reasons made sense to me.
But it didn’t change the fact that they felt wronged, and that was the real issue.
You might not be wrong in your own head, but you can still hurt someone, and the hurt is what you need to apologize for.
The best thing to do is own it, without bringing up past mistakes to win the present argument.
Then you can talk it out and make things better.
Prioritizing being right over resolving the issue only complicates things, and it almost cost me the peace in my marriage.
I’m so thankful I have a very patient husband who was ready to help me see it.
When you struggle to apologize and turn everything into a competition, people quietly learn that you’ll never admit you’re wrong, and it diminishes you in their eyes.
The true value of a woman lies in her ability to admit when she’s wrong and own it when she has hurt someone.
In my opinion, the need to always win an argument shows less emotional intelligence, not more.
4. Nothing Your Partner Does Is Ever Enough
Today you tell him you need him to do this and this and that, because that’s what you love.
Then he meets the measure, and bam, you move the goalpost.
You dismiss his thoughtful gestures because they fall short of the picture in your head.
There was something I had wanted to try for a long time, and my husband finally got it for me.
One thing about my husband is that when I say I want something, he doesn’t get just one; he goes all out.
So he got me three of them.
When I finally tried it, I didn’t even enjoy the experience.
But I appreciated it, and I appreciated him, especially since it wasn’t something he was even on board with in the first place.
It was a thoughtful gesture, and the fact that it didn’t meet my expectations didn’t mean I had to invalidate it.
When you dismiss his effort because it fell short, you’re telling him that whatever he does for you will never be enough.
That diminishes him in the relationship.
You also can’t keep comparing your relationship with other people’s.
You can’t be a millennial and expect your partner to express his love like a high school boy, because the realities are different.
Focus on the genuine effort in front of you instead of what is missing.
High standards and perfectionism are two different things.
Love counts in what he does over and over again, and a single perfect gesture was never the goal.
Perfection will never come to you anyway, because you keep shifting the goalpost.
That makes you very difficult to love, and honestly, it shows an inconsiderate and mean streak.
5. You Use Boundaries To Avoid Accountability
There’s a craze I see everywhere where women label every disagreement as disrespect.
Constructive criticism gets treated as an attack.
“This is just how I am” becomes the excuse for never changing harmful habits.
Some even excuse their toxicity with “it’s my zodiac sign, that’s how we’re wired.”
This thing is just crazy.
You can’t expect your partner to accommodate you while you refuse to compromise.
That’s why you have to meet him halfway.
You’re two different people with different upbringings, and he is set in his ways just as you are set in yours.
Imagine expecting him to absorb your ways hook, line, and sinker.
What is he supposed to do with his own life?
Put it on hold?
A real boundary protects your peace, and it still leaves room for you to grow.
When your “boundaries” are really rules about how he’s allowed to respond to you, you’re controlling him.
That kind of boundary just makes you bitchy, sis.
Call yourself to order and fine-tune your expectations.
Stop calling it a boundary every time someone asks you to be accountable.
A woman who refuses to own anything will be difficult to love, even for her own family, much less a lover.
6. You Expect Grace But Struggle To Give It
You expect understanding for your mistakes, even the ones you barely admit you made.
On the occasions you do realise you’ve goofed, you expect grace for all of it.
Then you turn around and condemn your partner’s mistakes.
You hold him to standards you struggle to meet yourself.
You refuse to forgive his honest mistakes, while you expect your own to be forgiven instantly and swept under the carpet.
You expect your feelings to take priority in every disagreement, especially when you’ve been caught red-handed in the web of your own mistakes.
You treat his honest slip like a pattern, while your own repeated cycle of harmful behaviour gets called a mistake.
You can’t build something on nothing.
If you don’t give grace, you shouldn’t expect it to be extended to you.
If the tables were turned and the script was flipped, you wouldn’t give grace to your partner or even the people around you.
That makes you very difficult to love, because there’s no room for grace in your dictionary.
So why should you be given grace when you can’t give it?
Knowing your worth is a beautiful thing, and I’ll never tell you to settle.
But your worth also includes being someone a good man can actually love without walking on eggshells.
If you saw yourself in a few of these, that’s okay, because I’ve been there too.
Own it, work on it, and give the people who love you the grace you’d want for yourself.
If loving you feels like hard work, check yourself before you check your standards.
