Relationship dealbreakers and how to spot yours

Most lists of relationship dealbreakers are really lists of preferences with strong feelings attached. The difference matters, because research on this suggests we already weigh negatives more heavily than positives when sizing someone up, so an inflated list quietly removes people who would have been good for us. Here are twenty that hold up, and a test for telling them apart.

What Counts as a Dealbreaker:

A dealbreaker is not a preference. It is something you would end an otherwise good relationship over, not something that merely annoys you and not something you would prefer were different. Something that, present, makes the rest irrelevant.

The test is the word otherwise. If the relationship is going well in every other respect and this one thing still ends it, it is a dealbreaker. If a good relationship would survive it, it is a preference, and calling it a dealbreaker just makes your search harder than it needs to be.

Why Dealbreakers Matter More Than Dealmakers:

Negative information carries more weight than positive information when people evaluate a potential partner. That was the conclusion of six studies involving more than 6,500 participants, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2015, which found that dealbreakers clustered around undesirable personality traits, unhealthy lifestyles, and mismatched intentions about relationships [1][2].

Two findings from that work are worth carrying around. Dealbreakers get stricter when people are considering a long-term relationship rather than something casual, which is a reasonable response to higher stakes rather than fussiness [1]. And people who rated their own mate value more highly tended to report more dealbreakers, while people with less restricted approaches to dating reported fewer [1].

20 Relationship Dealbreakers:

These are grouped by what they predict. Character issues predict how the whole relationship will run, while mismatched direction predicts a specific collision later.

Character and How They Treat People:

1. Contempt. Eye-rolling, mockery, and a general air of being above you or others.
2. Dishonesty about small things, which is a better predictor than dishonesty about large ones.
3. Cruelty to people who cannot answer back, including staff, strangers, and animals.
4. No accountability. Every conflict is somebody else’s doing.
5. Cheating, or a pattern of treating commitments as flexible.
6. Chronic unkindness about their own family or exes, with no self-examination anywhere in the story.

How They Treat You:

1. Control over your money, your movements, your phone, or who you see.
2. Pressure about physical intimacy, or treating a no as an opening position.
3. Isolating you from friends and family, usually framed as concern.
4. Contempt aimed specifically at you, in private or in company.
5. Making you afraid, in any form, at any point.

Lifestyle and Health:

1. Untreated addiction, whether alcohol, drugs, or gambling.
2. Refusal to address a serious mental health issue that is affecting both of you.
3. Financial behavior you cannot live with: hidden debt, secret accounts, no interest in changing.
4. Hostility toward your health needs or boundaries around them.
5. A lifestyle incompatibility neither of you will move on, from working patterns to substance use.

Mismatched Direction:

1. Children. One of you wants them and the other does not.
2. Monogamy. One of you wants it and the other does not.
3. Location, when neither person can move and neither will.
4. Faith or values that require different daily lives, not just different opinions.

Notice how few are about taste. Nothing on that list is about height, hobbies, music, or how somebody dresses, and that is the point. The items that end good relationships are about character, conduct, and direction.

Dealbreaker or Preference?

Four questions sort almost anything. Run a candidate item through them before you promote it to a dealbreaker, ideally in writing, because the honest answers are harder to dodge on paper.

Cap the list at five. Anyone can generate twenty items, and a list that long is not discernment, it is a filter that removes almost everybody while feeling like standards. Five things you would genuinely end a good relationship over is a lot.

How to Raise One Early:

Say it plainly by date three, in one sentence, without turning it into a summit. The items that involve direction, particularly children, monogamy, and location, cost more the longer they go unsaid, and they cost most of all in serious dating.

Keep the phrasing unloaded. Something like: I should say early that I do want children, so I would rather know if that is not where you are. It states your position, it does not demand a decision tonight, and it gives them room to be honest rather than agreeable. Our third date guide covers what else fits at that point.

Watch what happens next, which is more informative than the answer itself. Someone who answers directly, even with bad news, has shown you how they handle a difficult topic. Someone who gets vague, jokes about it, or promises to revisit it later has also told you something.

When You Are Ignoring One:

The pattern is always the same. You spot the thing, you name it privately, and then you build a case for why this instance is different. Overlooking clear warning signs damages trust in the relationship rather than protecting it [3].

Four rationalizations do the damage. They will change once things settle down. It only happens when they are stressed. Everyone has something. And the sunk-cost version: it is too late to start over now. Each one converts a decision into a delay.

Set a date, not a threshold. Vague resolutions to leave if it gets worse never trigger, because the worsening is gradual. Pick a specific date a few weeks out, write down what would need to be different by then, and look at it on the day. If nothing has changed, you have your answer and you made it in advance, when you were thinking clearly. The stages of relationships guide is useful for understanding what is normal friction and what is not.

What the Research Does Not Tell You:

Treat the study as a map, not a verdict. The authors themselves list real limitations: every study relied on people reporting their own preferences, which invites both agreeable answering and socially desirable answering, and several of the individual studies were exploratory or used small or cross-sectional samples [2].

What that means in practice is that this research is good evidence about what people say puts them off and weaker evidence about what actually ends relationships. Stated dealbreakers and real ones diverge, which anyone who has watched a friend date will recognize. Your own list is worth more than any published one, provided you write it honestly.

The most trusted platform for finding meaningful connections

The Other Half of the Question:

Name three dealmakers too, because a list made only of exclusions produces a search with no target. If negatives already carry extra weight in how we judge people, the correction is to be equally specific about what you are actually looking for [1].

Three is enough: the things that would make you overlook a lot of ordinary imperfection. Kindness under pressure, curiosity about your life, someone who follows through. Then filter for those, and let your five dealbreakers do the excluding quietly in the background rather than driving the whole search.

Being specific about direction is easier when the search itself works that way, which is what the filters here are for: values, lifestyle, and long-term goals rather than photos. Browse singles nearby, and write your five down first.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26445853/ – Jonason, Garcia, Webster, Li and Fisher, Relationship Dealbreakers: Traits People Avoid in Potential Mates, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015, 41(12), 1697-1711
[2] http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/jonasongarciawebsterlifisher2015.pdf – full text of the same study, including the finding that negative traits are weighed more than positive traits and the authors’ stated limitations
[3] https://theeverygirl.com/new-relationship-advice/ – The Everygirl, on trust and the cost of overlooking warning signs in early relationships

Key points