An interesting article ended with the following (edited for brevity) stanzas:

Hot is admired from afar; beauty is to be held.

Hot is perception; beauty is appreciation.

Hot is smokey-eyed; beautiful is bare-faced.

Hot is an appearance; beautiful is more than skin deep.

Hot is a strong appeal; beautiful is strong mind.

Hot is youthful; beautiful is ageless.

Hot is conventional; beauty is unique.

Hot is a state of being; beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Hot is a text message; beautiful is a love letter.

Hot is a facade; beautiful is a woman.

It sometimes is difficult to separate lust from love, but if you can describe what it is about a person that you are attracted to, and determine if it would land in the “hot” or “beautiful” column, then you may be closer to making the differentiation. The article is basically asking if you are looking at your date — in this case a woman — as a sexual object or with respect? Do you love how she looks more than who she is? Think about it.

After a tough breakup a lot of people think they need to start looking for someone who is the opposite of the type of person who just hurt them. But, finding someone who is blonde instead of brunette, corporate instead of an entrepreneur, quiet rather than loud, an introvert vs an extrovert, and so on, does not mean that the next relationship is going to be successful. There’s no one thing that is going to change the fate of a relationship. There are going to be traits that you’re attracted to which will contribute to a relationship never working, and there are traits that you will need in another person in order to complement your own traits. It will take some introspection to figure out which traits are which.

Liking a strong and outgoing person, but not wanting someone who is controlling is a difficult balance to find. That doesn’t mean that you should look for someone who is shy and quiet. Wanting to laugh and have fun is not the same as being made fun of and hearing constant sarcasm. That doesn’t mean you should find someone who is boring and serious all the time.

What it does mean is that you need to take your time and get to know someone, and see who you are and how you are when you are together.

Ah, the checklist. That necessary evil of dating where you’re forced to reduce the totality of the human experience into artificial and contrived parameters. Anyone who has ever been asked, “so what are you looking for?” has had to have their list memorized to deliver an elevator-pitch like succinct response. Dating sites like 100hookup force you to literally check off boxes to describe yourself and search for others. Naturally, people resist being placed into such boxes to the point where saying you “don’t fit in a box” is such a cliché that 100hookup could probably add that option to their profiles.

The trouble of course is that while websites, singles, and even shadchanim recognize both the utility and limitations of checklists, few people consider what these checklists really mean. Take the popular example of a checklist gone wrong is the “white tablecloth” requirement, where potential mates are rejected based on the content of their linen closet. I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that the absurdity correlating tablecloths with maintaining a successful relationship, and instead suggest that the tablecloth symbolizes a personally important religious aesthetic. Anyone who could appreciate someone saying that Hannukah just isn’t Hannukah without Bubbe’s Famous Latkes can understand the value of religious sentimentality.

Remember what I wrote a few weeks ago about dating and hope I think what applies there also applies to checklists. Every item represents a possibility, or based on one’s experience, probability. A PhD usually indicates a person is reasonably intelligent or values knowledge, which yeshivot one attended can be indicative of religious upbringing, etc. It doesn’t matter if any of these sorts of assumptions are true, or if they’re relevant to the essence of the person in the present. What matters isn’t even what people think about the checkboxes, but how they imagine what the relationship would be.

Unless you automatically accept every single dating possibility which comes your way, you’re going to have some standards about the people you date. And if you’re in any way serious about having a relationship, you’re going to want to maximize the potential of the date being “good” however you want to define it. Checklists aren’t about separating the naughty from the nice (it might be, but since this is a hookup dating website, we’re keeping things clean), but playing the odds to have the best chance of having a decent date.

The question is less about the checklists, but how much of them are dogmatic deal breakers. If you happened to hit it off with someone who didn’t have the right box checked, would you call it off or would you give it a shot? Obviously this is up to you, but every now and again, it’s worth checking in on our checklists.