Dating Advice From Anton Chigurh
Hear me out...
As a brother to three sisters my greatest fear used to be that they would not find husbands. I’m thrilled to be attending the third of their weddings this weekend.
My advice to them used to be that having dating criteria is like drawing a Mandala (overlapping circles), each representing an attribute. To take three common criteria/attributes, Intelligence, Attractiveness, and Success, high standards for each will create some small overlap at the center.
I use the mental image to illustrate how tough the game becomes the more circles you add. If you insist upon "above 6ft" and "from a good family" as additional circles on top of Intelligence, Attractiveness, and Success, you are making the overlap vanishingly small, and it is your fault. Consider three vs five criteria…
The danger of criteria obsession is obvious to people who think about these things a lot, but talking to women I find they often don't realize they're doing it, having arrived there through intuitive+subconscious processes.
So, to both men and women who are fatally narrowing their marriage prospects through criteria obsession (conscious or unconscious), my advice is to consider the following dating advice from Anton Chigurh:
If you are single, your criteria have brought you to this point, unsuccessfully. What that means is that you should be questioning them, not refining them further. What if you weren't very good at knowing what you want, or what would be good for you?
So… "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
—Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men, McCarthy)What if you weren't smart enough to know exactly what would be tossed your way, who he or she might be, or how that might go? It very well might be that only once you open up to anything that Something Might Happen.
Now, do red flags and disqualifying criteria exist? Of course, but you are far more likely to be on the over-discriminating side than the under.
For me personally, I had to let go of the silly notion that I could design my mate in a journal or spreadsheet and then through sheer force of will, clarity, and intentional action, make her materialize from the ether. As fate, the universe, God would have it, it was only when I gave up on all criteria and outcome-driven seeking that she appeared suddently on my path (met June 2023, married March 2025).
In summary, get out there, get over yourself, and don’t forget to smile!
I realised my "list" was just a way of putting a guard around my heart to prevent me from the very thing I so longed for. A list is just another way of trying to control the outcome and love cannot be constrained in such a way. So many of the attributes I wanted in a husband were a reflection of my own pride and discontentment for things in my own life and upbringing that I wanted to escape from. God has revealed my sin to me and humbled me in this regard and I am thankful for that.
What I see are people that become very good at dating but have little experience in building a relationship. So the marriage falls apart in short order and they go back to what they know--dating. I actually have very little experience dating but two successful marriages, one 37 years and the other ten, both ending when my spouse died. I have no idea how to deal with dating.