Your Dating Standards Are Keeping You Single (ft. Todd Baratz, LMHC)

Are our dating standards keeping us single? Are we too quick to label people toxic, narcissistic, or full of red flags? Sexologist Alexa Andre (@sexwithalexa) gets in bed with sex therapist and author Todd Baratz for a conversation about modern dating, sex, intimacy, relationship anxiety, and why finding a healthy relationship might require us to rethink everything we’ve been taught about love.

Does a healthy relationship mean never having doubts or never going to bed angry? Todd challenges popular relationship advice and explains why real connection requires vulnerability, curiosity, discomfort, and the willingness to do the work.

Topics discussed:

• Modern dating and disconnection: How social media and wider cultural changes influence connection, intimacy, and the way we relate to each other.

• Vulnerability and emotional intimacy: Why opening up feels so difficult, how our defenses protect us from rejection, and why emotional closeness requires ongoing self-work.

• Dating standards and the search for the perfect partner: How unrealistic expectations and the pursuit of an ideal relationship can shrink your dating pool.

• Red flags, dealbreakers, and dating anxiety: Whether political differences, wanting children, lifestyle preferences, and other incompatibilities should determine who gets a chance.

• Entitlement, self-worth, and reciprocity: What we deserve in relationships and why healthy relationships require collaboration rather than one-sided demands.

• Couples therapy and emotional labor: What happens when one partner is ready to work on the relationship and the other resists.

• Relationship doubts and the fear of commitment: Why doubt is a normal part of making choices and why you don't need to feel 100% certain about your partner.

• Closure and heartbreak: Whether closure is necessary to heal, how to process grief without someone else's apology, and why the popular advice “if they wanted to, they would” can create more disconnection.

• Why the right relationship can trigger you: How intimacy brings unresolved childhood wounds to the surface, why the real question is how partners respond to conflict, and how repair and emotional safety distinguish a challenging relationship from a harmful one.

• Therapy speak and performative healing: Why words like “boundaries,” “attachment,” “triggered,” “holding space,” and “narcissist” can lose their meaning when they're used to avoid vulnerability rather than create genuine connection.

• Trauma, anxiety, and self-awareness: Why understanding your history is not the same as feeling and processing it, why we may need to worry less, and how to stop turning every difficult experience into an intellectual exercise.

• Therapy, self-help, and doing the work: Why practical steps such as therapy, books, and relationship resources can help us grow, and why insight alone doesn't automatically change our behavior.

• Authenticity and being yourself: Todd's perspective on showing up as a real person rather than performing a polished therapist persona, the pressure to maintain different identities at work and in relationships, and why humor, honesty, and imperfection matter.

• Todd's personal struggles and growth: His experiences with being single, solitude, relationship challenges, heartbreak, self-care, and decades of therapy and how he handles difficult emotions without beating himself up.

• Discomfort, shame, and curiosity: Why learning to tolerate uncertainty, asking more questions, challenging rigid thinking, and becoming more open to other people can create deeper connections.

Follow Todd:Instagram: @yourdiagnonsense

Website: www.toddsbaratz.com

Follow Alexa Andre:Instagram: @sexwithalexa

Patreon: https://patreon.com/sexwithalexa

Book a call: https://www.sexwithalexa.co/book-online

Sponsor:

Thank you, Beducated, for making this exploration possible. Take their quiz to start your journey: https://beducate.me/alexa