An Understanding of “Quality” In Relationships

Quality… oh how we all want quality time, quality partners, quality sex, quality relationships. We tell our partners, we write on our profiles, and we continually tell ourselves, we want quality!

You’re either looking at a dating profile or finishing your own off, and you might add this little nugget of wisdom:

“I want quality over quantity!”

Great! That’s a great mindset… but… what does it mean? Sure, it’s understood that you’d rather date one high-quality person instead of ten people of low quality.

But what exactly is quality? How do you expect others to interpret that positive, but vague, statement?

According to Google, one of the definitions of quality is “general excellence of standard or level.”

That phrase, “general excellence,” is key to understanding quality in all its forms.

If we want quality food, for instance, we can talk about the general excellence of taste, presentation, ingredients. Quality doesn’t always mean it costs more, but sometimes it does. Entire television networks are devoted to judging food quality.

They get down into the nitty-gritty details of the specific preparation of a raspberry tart that they interview the chef during the process to get inside their head for how the pie will be quality that the judges love.

They cannot read the judges’ minds, so what exactly is the quality standard they are going by? Sure, it must be edible, but that’s a very base standard of quality for chefs at a competition. Quality is not such a simple term after all.

It would be easy to say that quality is like that famous Supreme Court quote about obscenity… you can’t define it; you just know it when you see it. I’ve felt such an explanation about words is a cop-out. If you can’t define words, maybe you should give up your job which involves words and their interpretation to lead a nation to someone more qualified.

And so, with quality, we’re going to define it.

Quality Is An Art and A Science

I used to work in quality for over a decade in the automotive industry when I was younger and before I made the leap to a new field of work. The experiences that I had working in quality with over a dozen different companies shaped how I viewed the world.

When you can’t open a bottle or jar, you might blame yourself for not having enough strength. I blame the uncontrolled process being monitored improperly on some production line.

When you see a dark spot on the console of a new car, you might wonder if someone accidentally touched it with a pen. I see unmixed ingredients and possibly a temperature variation within an injection mold process not spreading the color evenly.

In the time that my career in quality was with the automotive industry, I judged such things as the quality of internal parts, their specs. I also decided the quality of components in the passenger cabin that people could see every day. I not only worked at the beginning of the process when parts were made, but I was also a test driver for Honda.

My life revolved around questions of quality at all times. It provided a focus on problems, causes, and resolutions. Were the parts within tolerance? Did the color shade match the approved sample? Did the car “feel” right when driving?

This turned into a good deal of self-examination, culminating in choices in my life such as the pursuit of nonmonogamy and becoming a writer.

I found parallels between my work and my life.

Some parts of quality are objective. A hardened gear must be “hard” within a specified tolerance. Was it too hard and brittle or was it too soft and squishy? If it were too hard, it would snap under pressure. If it were too soft, it would slowly bend out of shape over time.

Relationships are like that. If you are too firm in your opinions, not yielding enough, your relationship will snap. If you are not firm enough in your views, bending too much to the other person, your relationship will slowly twist into a one-sided monstrosity.

I learned to be objective about what other people called subjective.

Colors are subjective though, right? Your blue isn’t my blue, your red isn’t my red, right? Wrong.

I am one of the very few people in the world who passes a color shade test with a perfect score. That’s a feat only possible to a minority of even other quality professionals. But my great eyes were not the standard by which color is measured. I could spot a tiny color variation across a room. But what I think subjectively had to be translated into an objective observation.

There is a particular camera called a spectrometer that takes a photo of a part and matches it up to an approved color sample. It will tell you if there is too much blue in a grey, within a predefined tolerance.

Color is not subjective. Everything has a standard, an example of the “ideal” part. Everything also has tolerance, how much everything else is allowed to deviate from the standard. Quality is all about tolerances based on standards.

But who made the standards? Who said this grey is the grey that you want? Why not darker? Why not lighter? Well, that is more subjective. Someone has to define what quality means. Someone has to set the tolerances. Testing is objective, but setting some standards and tolerances are ultimately based on some engineer’s subjective conclusion.

But once it’s set, then it’s measurable and repeatable.

How does one define quality in a relationship and then make it measurable and repeatable?

After all, that’s another aspect of quality. If you can’t measure and repeat a thing, it’s a unicorn. Quality, while mostly subjective, lends to it an air of sustainability over time.

Quality standards are often subjective, even if we might find things objective to be standards of quality.

Standards Are a Personal Preference

Let’s think about future partners as cars.

People don’t go out and say, “I think I’ll waste my hard earned money on a real piece of shit car.”

Likewise, people don’t go on a dating website and say, “I think I’ll waste my time, money, and emotions on a real piece of shit person.”

Let’s think about our current partners that way.

If you don’t take care of your car with regular oil changes, cleaning, and avoiding accidents, you won’t have a quality car for long. It will break down, look like shit, and stop running.

Likewise, people don’t tell their partners, “When we hang out tonight, I want you to avoid me when I’m talking. I hope he gives me mean looks when I ask a question and sneers at my emotions.”

We ask questions when we deal with cars. What the heck is a good car? What’s a quality vehicle?

We ask those same questions when we deal with people. Who is a quality partner? Who is worth my time?

If you are reading this in the hopes that I will tell you some secret, magical formula, you will be disappointed.

I can tell you some basic standards that all people should probably meet to be good people. Moderately ethical, not prone to lying, even temperament, the ability to express emotions well, etc.

But what makes a quality person, just like a quality car, depends on what you want. I can tell you that a basic standard for a quality car is to have four wheels, an engine of some kind, and seats won’t help you choose between a Ford or a Toyota.

That all depends on what your standards are.

Does the car fall within your set tolerance? What is general excellence in an automobile? Safety, dependability, sustainability, mileage, speed, affordability?

To one person, a Volvo may be the highest quality card on the road. To another, a Ferrari. And to yet another, a Tesla.

Some people like Samsung phones, others like Apple iPhones, while others like Android phones that aren’t Samsung phones. Even if you go by the opinion of others, a sort of “Amazon ranking means quality,” you still have to be in the same neighborhood of product. If you don’t want an iPhone, no amount of good reviews will convince you otherwise. It’s permanently outside your tolerance.

Even though most things can be measured objectively, the judgment of quality standards and your tolerance to deviations from that is subjective.

This applies to relationships as well. Who is a quality partner? Who is my ideal? How close to my ideal should someone be? What is my ideal quality time with someone? What are negative traits in a relationship that I’ll never tolerate?

To one person, quality time is sitting quietly while reading or pursuing solitary activities while in the same place, enjoying each others space. To another person, quality time is going out and partying until the wee hours of the morning.

As one of my partners put it, there might be people out there who think clipping their toenails together is quality time. And I must admit, I’ve experienced this. I did a mani-pedi with a partner last year for my birthday, and it was very quality time having my toenails trimmed with them.

The same holds true for quality partners. To one person, a quality partner is someone who is intellectually stimulating. To another person, a quality partner is someone who is nurturing. To yet another, a quality partner is someone who is wild in the bedroom.

I recently had feedback on one of my articles about how to tell your wife about your girlfriend. They didn’t like the word “allow” because it reeked of what they called “toxic mono-normative possessiveness.”

I pointed out to them that they had misread the intention with which I use the word allow. I am a staunch supporter of personal freedom, consent, and free will. When I use the word “allow” I use it as the personal expression of “This falls within my tolerance.”

We often use the word “standards” in relationships when we actually mean “tolerance.” An allowance is the things that happen around and to us that we are willing to tolerate.

The purpose of relationship communication is so that two people may present their desires to one another and expose the available areas in which the desires and tolerances overlap. When we find areas of overlap, then we have the basis to form an agreement.

This takes many forms.

“I’ll rub your feet if you scratch my back.”

“We can go to the RomCom Tuesday and then the baseball game Thursday.”

And yes, it even includes, “We’ll open up our marriage and give polyamory a try.”

If your wife “allows” you do date other women, it’s because your polyamorous activity falls within the tolerance of the types of relationships she is willing to accept in her life. It’s not that she can stop you, but she can remove her consent from being in a relationship with you.

This is often what we mean by boundaries. Boundaries are based on negative tolerances.

If we painted a basketball court green and everything outside the court as red, we represent the green play area as “tolerance” of allowable areas we set in our lives, and the red out of bounds areas as the “boundaries” of unallowable areas we set in our lives.

The goal/hoops would be our “standards.”

Harmful Standards

There is a gender negative cliche about men’s preferences. The negative sex cliche says that men are the gas pedal and women are the brakes. The other harmful cliche is that men want conflicting things from their female partners.

Are they asking for a lady, a mommy, or a whore? (While I often refer to myself as a whore, an ethical slut, I hear this negative word used FAR too much in our society and in this cliche.)

Paganism offers an interesting analogy, maiden, mother, and crone. That phrase “a lady in the streets and a freak in the bed” is used by both men and women for a person who is “all things.” Who can be all things, all aspects, though? Who is perfect at everything?

One can set negative goals, expectations, and standards. One can also set very unrealistic standards that create an ideal person that is impossible.

Sure, we should have an ideal that stretches what we want to a reasonable limit. But we shouldn’t create an ideal so far outside reality that nobody can live up to it. This only opens us up to be overly critical of people who fail to live up to this standard.

I find that when I hear those cliches, the bile rises in my throat when I hear them.

Many standards promote harmful stereotypes for both men and women. But we can acknowledge that there is a feeling behind “wanting it all” that does ring true, in that we want someone who isn’t one dimensional.

And it’s healthy that we want people in our lives who meet specific criteria. You can’t define your wants and needs so broadly that you create this unrealistic persona of your ideal partner that becomes a caricature that nobody can live up to.

Ask most women how they’d like to be pigeonholed into even one of those three roles, and you’ll likely get a healthy “hell no” in response because those standards overly objectify people. I know many women complain that their man needs their mommy back because they’re tired of trying to be that for them.

This stereotypical view can also be implied to men. Men are sometimes expected to stoic, sexually confident, and ambitious. Rather than going in the direction of being everything, this stereotype has a singular vision of men.

Instead, the healthy thing to do is to set standards and expectations for what constitutes quality partners more subtly and realistically. Real people aren’t equally everything, nor singular all the time. Both extremes are harmful views.

After all, people are not cars. And too many times, we’re more forgiving of our cars than we are our partners.

If you owned a Porsche and got a flat tire, you wouldn’t call it a shitty Porsche and abandon it at the side of the road. You would do what you had to do to fix it. And the more you loved that car, the more time, energy, and money you’d spend on making it right again.

But when it comes to people and relationships, we often blame people over circumstances. We have a mental image: A flat tire happens TO a car. But a relationship’s flat tire happens BECAUSE of the people.

That seems a little unrealistic. People are either quality or not. Sure, a relationship can be wrecked and totaled even with quality people. But quality people are quality people. And we have to put in our own quality work to maintain quality relationships with quality people.

Quality People

Often, it is when we try to use objective labels for people that we deem those views shallow and hurtful. If our definition of a quality partner is merely any man between the ages of 30 and 50, six foot three inches to six foot six inches, with an annual income of at least $250,000, we would most likely be called the shallowest of the shallow because we are looking only at numbers. If we are not looking at the actual person, then we’ve dehumanized them.

If your idea of a quality female is a Barbie doll, it’s not that people can’t live up to a good standard. It’s that you’re merely an unreasonable asshole.

There are indeed attractive and wealthy people in the world. Experiments have shown that the average person dates inside their own standard of beauty and attractiveness.

This might indicate that one of the most valuable tools in relationships might be, “Know thyself.” Rather than objectifying people, understanding who you are to others may be the healthiest way to find compatible partners.

And this might very much also speak to taking a look at where you stand regarding standards. For whom would you honestly be ideal?

When dealing with advanced forms of relationships, conducting our quality inventory is one of the ways we can both shape our existing relationships and help define what we want out of new relationships, as well as making sure that we are a good fit for our partners as well.

If we don’t want the uber sports fan who goes to the bar every weekend to watch the game to be upset with us, we might want to make sure that we’re the person they want as well. We might ask, “They may be a good fit for us, but are we a good fit for them?”

This is solved by doing a self-inventory of what is quality about ourselves. And from that, we can create the complimentary inventory for what we would like to see in others.

When doing an inventory of anything we usually are looking for positives and negatives that stick out for us. We discard the slightly positive and the somewhat negative and anything approaching neutral. We want the “best” list.

Top 3 lists are great for this. What are our best features, our best talents, our best relationship tools? What are our worst features, our worst skills, and our least developed relationship tools?

For instance, here’s an example list some facets a person might find about themselves to be “generally excellent” (quality):

1. I’m very emotional availability.
2. I have a strong naughty streak.
3. I read a lot of non-fiction and like to talk about it.

And here is a list of negative (undesirable qualities):

1. I can’t stand religious activities.
2. I absolutely can’t be around large crowds.
3. I’m not ambitious with my career.

From this, we might do an inventory of our ideal partner. They might have the positive qualities of:

1. Tender-hearted
2. Up for adventures alone and outdoors.
3. Intellectually bent

See how those tend to mirror our own qualities? We usually do this unconsciously, but putting it down on paper, we can see why we want what we want. Let’s example an inventory of negative qualities that we do not want in a partner.

1. Talks about anything metaphysical
2. Likes to party
3. Driven and busy with work all the time.

Each of these is subjective. The words you use in your inventory have a special meaning to you.

Just remember this before copying your inventory word for word into a dating profile. What you might find to be a meanness towards others could be seen as a form of honesty to someone else.

We can also apply this to something like quality time.

Quality Time

Maybe you have some positive standards of quality time such as the following:

1. Showing focused attention.
2. Spending time alone together and sharing an experience.
3. Physical Intimacy

Let’s also assume that you also have negative standards of quality time or things that break quality time, such as the following:

1. Being distracted by other people (in person or phone)
2. Not fully participating in the experience.
3. Being so into yourself that you forget “us,” making me more your audience member or receptacle, rather than your partner.

With each of these subjective standards, they will likely require a detailed explanation.

Define the Standard

It should be no surprise that when people talk to each other about having quality partners or spending quality time together that this is borderline meaningless between two people because quality means different things to different people.

Your standards are not my standards. You tolerances are not my tolerances. Your boundaries are not my boundaries.

First, what we mean by quality differs by which of a multitude of subjective standards we use.

Second, what those subjective standards mean is to have a variety of individual definitions.

Third, how we judge and apply those subjective standards are entirely different from person to person.

I must confess that I’ve also told partners things like, “I want to spend more quality time with you.” And when they ask what I mean, I have said, “Well, not like this.” And when pressed I might say, “Well, like that night two weeks ago, that was quality.”

I might as well have been telling them that I like frufraldorps with azlilberries. Without a definition of quality, we’re just speaking jibberish to our partners.

We’re showing them shadows instead of pictures.

Whenever we have such conversations with our partners, we have to get down into the nitty-gritty of the exact details. That means communicating precise information.

The shadow: “I don’t consider the distracted time we spend together to be quality time.”

The picture: “I don’t consider trying to talk to you while you play XBox to be quality time, because I have to fight for your attention and I feel ignored even when you are speaking to me.”

We have work our way down to the details.

Someone might rightly ask, “What’s the difference between when I’m playing XBox and when we’re playing a board game together and talking?”

You have to start with those foundational positive and negative standards, which become your grounding philosophies.

But remember that your thoughts are not etched in stone. They are merely useful guides to explanations for yourself and others about why certain things work, and why certain things don’t.

And these explanations grow and change with time.

Think of your standards in a meal.

You won’t add “hair in my food” to your negatives about quality food until you first find one and nearly gag and experience such an overwhelming repulsion that even the thought makes you gag!

From that day on, “hair in my food” is added at the top of your negative standards for quality food.

Standards are usually generic, somewhat vague and broad. They should apply in many different situations.

For instance, my own list includes “showing focused attention.” That means something to me, but so vague I can’t just say those three words to someone and expect them to have a clue of what I mean.

To me, that means paying attention, listening, taking conversational cues, and so on. It also helps drive some automatic negative standards, such as continually checking phone, playing games, doing your taxes, marching on Rome, and cutting toenails.

And so, when I don’t feel I am having quality time because someone is cutting their toenails, I don’t hit them out of the blue statement about lacking quality time for something I never listed as being quality time because I can instead go back to a principle.

In that case, maybe it’s not quality time because we’re not sharing, or attention is distracted. I have to understand the principle and zero in on details.

Instead of complaining about the toenails, or them marching their armies to sack Rome, or them looking through piles of papers for a 1031Q-47 tax form, I can point to “showing focused attention” as an overriding marker that demonstrates the feeling of quality time to me. I can then describe precisely what about the situation isn’t meeting my principle, or what could be added to help achieve the principle.

This can similarly be applied to quality people. What general principles do the people you consider quality in your life all share? What are some traits they all lack that you are glad that they don’t have?

Can you describe the basic standard, the principle? Can you give exact details about a real person that meets or breaks that principle? Can you identify what would need to change for the principle or standard to be achieved?

Until you can do that to yourself, you can’t communicate your needs, desires, standards, tolerances, or boundaries to other people.

Again, “Know thyself.”

Going through these and making a few lists every time you are looking for “quality” will help you find “general excellence” in all things. It transforms from this nebulous “I never get quality” to something more concrete. It starts generating ideas by making us question what quality means to us, and what specific examples are there for each of our standards.

Bringing It All Together

1. Know that quality is “general excellence” that is defined by you, and only you. Overly simplistic example: You like tall partners.
2. Set standards based on an ideal version of yourself and of your potential partners. Overly simplistic example: Maybe your ideal partner is six foot.
3. Go into details that would lay out how tolerant you are of deviations from the perfect standard. Overly simplistic example: You’d be fine with five-foot-ten to six-foot-two.
4. What negative qualities could you absolutely not live with? Overly simplistic example: I hate being woken up before 7 am!
5. Go into your negative standards both for yourself and your potential partners. Overly simplistic example: Your ideal partner would wake up at 7 am, too.
6. Go into details that would lay down how tolerant you are of deviations from this, aka your boundaries. Overly simplistic example: You’re fine if they wake up at 4 am, so long as they don’t wake you up.

Once you can identify most of these and clearly express, define, and explain them, you have something worthwhile to say instead of the statement we started with, “I want quality over quantity!”

Our new overly simplistic statement might be, “I find quality partners to be tall, ideally six foot, but five-foot-ten to six-foot-two. I am not an early bird, and don’t want to be with someone who is an early bird unless they can get up without waking me up.”

Working this out yourself with three positive qualities and three negative qualities for yourself, and the same for your partners, you’ll literally wind up with a one or two page statement of your qualities, your faults that could turn down other partners, as well as the qualities you are looking for, and the faults you want to avoid.

Eat your heart out OKCupid, you just nailed a concise statement of quality and communicated your actual wants and needs!

Doing this in a relationship on topics such as quality time, quality conversations, etc. will help you and all of your partners communicate to each other effectively to create an ideal environment around yourselves that’s fertile ground for agreements and activities that generate some optimal situations for happiness and connecting!

Now you have ideals and goals. You have the coordinates for where you want to be. You have the destinations pinpointed.

If you’ve been feeling lost in your relationships or dating, remember: Without a destination, every direction is the same.