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People In This Online Thread Are Sharing The Pettiest Reasons They Refused To Date Someone, Here Are 65 Of Their Most Honest Responses
The paradox of choice (ref Barry Schwartz) has heavily influenced modern dating. The more options we can have (literally at the swipe of a finger), the easier it is to move on to the next one. Call it petty or knowing your self-worth, but we are quick to pass on anyone who doesn't tick one box in our list, even if they check all the rest of the boxes. Although some time ago, the biggest turn-offs and deal-breakers in dating were cheating in previous relationships or having a criminal record, the bar is much higher today. And thank goodness it is!
Reasons not to date someone, as well as dating deal-breakers, may vary from petty and absurd to wholly rational and justifiable. Yet, all are valid since, at the end of the day, everyone has the right to decide who they want to be with. Still, let's be honest, sometimes these reasons are also getting petty, and the biggest turn-offs in a person become trivial things like not having a car or their eyes not closing all the way when they're asleep. That's right. And the latter example is actually derived from a thread on AskReddit, in which the now-deleted user asked fellow community users, "What's the most petty reason you stopped dating someone?" And many didn't beat around the bush. These folks know what they like and even more so what they don't. And that alone deserves some respect!
Below, we've compiled some of the best answers from the thread, revealing the pettiest reasons not to date someone that people so frankly shared with others. Can you justify or relate to some of the answers? Let us know by giving those an upvote! Also, let us know the pettiest reason not to date someone that you have given to somebody or, perhaps (sorry to remind you of this) have received yourself? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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"It was my birthday party and he gave me a piece of candy but gave all my friends TWO pieces of candy. I got mad, broke up with him, made a scene, my brother punched him and we kicked him out of our house. Also, we were both 7 and my brother was 4."
Hawkeye77th said:
"She used a metal spatula in my nonstick pan."
imk replied:
"I am pretty sure that is a felony."
"Rude to the waitress."
"'cUs sHe TeXteD LiKe dIs! :):):):):p:p:p:p =))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))."
I know someone who often texts like a toddler, and substitutes a lot of emojis for words. I like to ask her to translate for me every time, because maybe she'll finally catch the hint that I don't enjoy texts like this.
User No 1 said:
"I was told this was petty but I disagree. When I refused to take public transit every weekend to go see him I knew it wasn’t going to work. For the record, it would have taken me upwards of 4 hours and 5 buses because of where he lived. It would take him 45 minutes to come to get me if he wanted to spend the weekend together. He did not work but had a nice income from the Navy. I was working and wasn’t done with work until 6/7 pm. His reason was that he didn’t want to put that many miles on his car."
AlliedSalad replied:
"Your time was less valuable to him than his odometer. I'm with you, that's valid, not petty."
User No 1 said:
"Kept tryna video call me at odd hours of the day."
Ancient_Lifeguard_16 replied:
"Video calling out of the blue is the modern equivalent of showing up at someone’s house unannounced."
"She believed the moon landing was faked."
It was faked. The technology was nowhere close at the time to be able to pull it off.
"She smelled... not super strongly necessarily, but she smelled exactly like one of my roommates in college, specifically the kind of B.O. he had in the summer that would linger in the bathroom when he shat.
I gave her a kiss on the cheek toward the end of our first date, which is when I noticed that faint, but uncanny smell, and I knew that if we ever got intimate all I'd be able to think about was my roommate taking fat dumps."
User No 1 said:
"Her apartment only had street parking."
Impossibleish replied:
"Ah, finally. A truly petty reason."
"IDK if this counts, but I already not liking this girl, and she told me that God told her we should break up. I immediately was like well haha don't wanna mess with the big man. She regretted it and tried getting back with me, but I kept sarcastically insisting she shouldn't go against God's will."
"Oh man, I’ve got a good one for this. This girl I dated had a cat and she would just pour cat food on the floor when she wanted to eat. Claimed the cat didn’t like eating out of bowls.
She didn’t have a litter box either, and the cat would poop on her couch.
She didn’t have any cat care items other than cat food.
It was basically a stray outdoor cat she was trying to charm."
"Went to her house to watch a movie. She put her bare feet on my lap and her feet smelt awful. 2 hours of musty feet in my face
I ended it 2 days later."
"She told me to stop making gay jokes around her straight friends. We were literally a gay couple and I wasn't about to give up my terrible puns."
"Went on one date with a guy who drove about 20 miles per hour when he took me home. We were on downtown streets where the limit was 30-35. When we passed a parked car, he would drive even slower! People behind him started honking and it was just excruciating. He took me home and then as soon as he got home, sent me an email (this was like 2010) telling me what a great time he'd had. We did not go on another date."
Why not just ask why he's driving so slowly? Perhaps he was a new or nervous driver.
Roooster111 said:
"We were both in our late 20s, but she spoke like a middle-aged woman. Both vocabulary and the way she spoke. Can't give any exact examples as it wasn't in English.
Her name also sounded like she was 50+."
Drakeskulled_Reaper replied:
"Close call, energy vampire."
I'd love to know more about this one. Did she complain about her back pain, ex-husband, kids and her mortgage? She used big words and never called you "dude"? Fascinating.
"He wore knee-length jean shorts.
Just couldn’t ever unsee that."
BranigansLaw said:
"She would try to show me songs she liked, and then change them halfway through a first listen."
User No 2 replied:
"I’ve done this out of fear they don’t like the song and I’m being dumb."
RealLADude said:
"She said, surprised, “You’re the kind of guy who looks up words in the dictionary when you don’t understand them, aren’t you?”
She was a kindergarten teacher."
OkCoast9806 replied:
"Isn't that a good thing though? Like expanding your vocabulary? What a weird thing for her to say..."
"Her toenails...
It was like yellow-ish color and also very very long. Wtf was she thinking when she asked me to take her socks off?"
Long toenails are unpleasant. Can you imagine sleeping next to this? hell-no-64...328271.jpg 
"He wouldn't pronounce his Ls in some words. Instead of "I told her" he would say "I toad her"."
NancyBeversheski said:
"Spent the evening with a man and when I helped clean up after dinner, he lost his s**t and broke up with me because I put the pot holders in the wrong drawer.
Dodged a bullet..."
PMmeJuicyButts replied:
"I think you dated my dad. Although on second thought, he wouldn't have broken up with you, just angrily moved the pot holders to their proper place while making annoyed noises."
Car_loapher said:
"She didn’t use her turn signals."
The_Fat_Controller replied:
"That's not petty, that's looking after your own safety."
"I heard them take a poop when they were talking to me on the phone."
This is why mute is a thing. When you're talking, you stop everything. Mute while they talk and continue.
"For some reason every time he laughed he would be super bubbly physically, like throwing his head back in all directions and throwing his arms up everywhere and I was like who the f**k laughs like a car bobblehead figurine?"
"Knew someone who broke up with his girlfriend because she had to wear glasses. The reason he gave me was that he didn’t like glasses."
Hey, us spectacle wearers have to frickin pay to see you.... That's a stupid reason 😠
"He didn’t believe dinosaurs were real."
jlcd11147 said:
"He rearranged stuff in my house while I was asleep."
samshine replied:
"I feel like this needs more details. What did he rearrange and was there a reason?"
jlcd11147 replied:
"He turned every photo that had another man in it backward in the frame.
But I also just don't like having my things messed with. So even if it had been the rearranging of pillows, that would've done it."
"She kept using the word 'infer' when she obviously meant 'imply'."
"Well, she stopped dating me but it was petty as hell in my opinion.
I worked nights, she didn't work at all. Somehow she thought that whenever she was awake that I also must be awake.
After months of tirelessly explaining how I physically and mentally could not get lunch with her after I just worked, or how I could not go to a party at midnight with her, she finally said f**k it, and left.
She just could not comprehend how I could not do those things, in her mind working nights meant I work 9 am to 5 pm. I tried to tell her that I in fact did not work 9 am to 5 pm but she wasn't having it.
To this day I have absolutely no idea how she got regular 9 to 5 from me saying I work nights. The mental gymnastics would have won a gold medal."
"I was listening to "Free Faillin", and this girl said, you know, this song is overrated and I don't like the singer.
What? You don't like Tom Petty? I left her adult-contemporary hating a** on the curb.
That's the pettiest reason I can think of.
tl;dr: Don't capitalize Petty in the title of your post unless you goddamn mean it. Respect the man. Respect the capitalization."
"He had small hands. They looked weird and weren’t proportional to the rest of him."
"Not on my side, but I got dumped for not getting into a fight.
I can handle myself, I'm not Bruce f**king Lee, but I can deal with someone being a prick, maybe 2 if I'm in a bad mood.
I cannot handle being mobbed by 6 people at once, who clearly have murder on their minds (I had kicked one of them out of my place for trashing it, and he got his mates together.)
Instead, I took her and got the f**k out of there, was dumped the next day."
TyeneSandSnake said:
"I really didn’t like the way she dressed. Ill-fitting clothes and sketchers. She dressed like a toddler. It’s shallow and I knew it was shallow so I just kept trying to ignore it. But then she held my hand in public and I got embarrassed and I knew it had to be the end.
Also, she was a laugh clapper. When she found something funny she would clap her hands when she laughed. And we went to see a comedy movie and I just wanted to sneak out of the movie theater."
UnicornPanties replied:
"I was friends with a laugh clapper who only had one arm and a stump just below her elbow on the other arm (tragic burn victim).
When she laughed really hard she would clap her stump. It was rough for me to keep a straight face the first time that happened."
My friend has a smiley face tattooed on her arm stump, or "nub," as we call it. 🙂
"There are other reasons besides this one, but the final straw was when she called Futurama a "mediocre cartoon"."
I agree. I've never liked Futurama. The comedic timing is all wrong and the voices are bad.
Writeloves said:
"He said I looked like a female Woody Harrelson.
Like dude, I may have blue eyes and a big nose but come on. We are on a date. That is not the kind of thing you say to someone you are trying to romance."
frontal_robotomy replied:
"LOL, that's horrible but hilarious."
That's also not petty. Giving backhanded 'compliments' is called negging and is a horrible dating technique meant to undermine the self esteem of the partner to use their insecurities to make them more pliable and dependent. It's a red flag and people who do this should be dumped immediately.
User No 1 said:
"He thought smoking weed was a personality trait."
albokun replied:
"How did this come about during dating?"
User No 3 replied:
"Well, he briefly mentioned his habit on our first date. I don't smoke myself but I have liberal views when it comes to weed. When I revealed my views later on our second date he took it as a green light to go on a rant on how weed is some kind of a miracle drug that can cure everything from depression to cancer. And then weed was the only subject he wanted to talk about. At first, I listened but after three hours it just got my nerves. Oh and then he smoked a joint too in the middle of our date. Even though I had made it clear I can't stand its smell."
theoneinashes said:
"It was years ago but I broke up with someone because they didn’t tell me their first name. For context, this was 5th grade and he went by his middle name."
horrormetal replied:
"My mother's entire side of the family have all gone by their middle names for generations. It has to do with some Irish folklore about fae."
"I LITERALLY couldn't say more than two words without him cutting me off to interject. I don't think he was trying to be rude. According to him, he was super excited to be on the date, and I think he just... couldn't stop himself from interrupting? It was so frustrating."
theshoegazer said:
"Tried to play "TGIF" as a word in Scrabble."
Nambot replied:
"Which is absurd, because "GIFT" is right there, and even if she's playing off of different letters, she has other options for actual words, depending on the state of the board."
amblerina said:
"I went on a date with a guy and when I told him I spoke Spanish as a second language, he started to refer to me as Peggy Hill."
imk replied:
"That boy wasn’t right."
"He ate his candy bars with a fork and knife."
"Voice. Funny girl, smart girl, way way too attractive for me girl. Her voice was in the same register as Janice on friends or Fran Drescher in the nanny. Like daggers in my ears. Could not get over it, after the third date had to back off and tell her I was a way too busy right now."
Reminds me of this deaf guy I saw getting hearing implants for the first time. He has never heard his wife's voice before. His facial expression when he heard her talk was priceless 🤣🤣🤣
DasWulf23 said:
"Not me, but a friend broke up with a girl because she didn't like the movie Back to the Future."
DastFight replied:
"I showed my girlfriend the trilogy when we started living together. It was thrilling to show those masterpieces to someone for the first time."
Q_Tip said:
"I was kicking it with this girl but when she slept, her eyes didn’t close all the way. She looked like X-Men Cyclops, always got her eyeballs on me. Very unsettling so I had to dip."
jasmineryu replied:
"You should've gotten her a sleeping mask."
Make_u_wet_holy_watr said:
"We went to the movies on a first date and he put his coat on the floor in a crowded movie theater. It was too chaotic and different."
perfectlyniceperson replied:
"Too chaotic and different is the perfect description for his actions."
"I broke up with my first bf in junior high because he bought me an Avril Lavigne CD for our 1 month anniversary. I didn't even like Avril Lavigne so I thought it was really random and weird, and it just felt like too much. In retrospect, he was just trying to be nice and I was super petty lmao."
JanaCinnamon said:
"He told me "we can work on that" after I showed him my favorite album. Never gonna date someone who exclusively listens to house ever again."
Splitface2811 replied:
"I don't know if I could ever go out with someone who exclusively listens to one type of music.
I have my favorite genres/bands/songs, but I listen to and enjoy just about every type of music. Some one that only listens to one genre would bore me rather quickly."
Someone who listened exclusively to modern country music would be a deal breaker for me. And I like everything from classical to folk to pop to metal to punk to hardcore. But the whole "I love this bar, my pickup truck, that old dirt road, red solo cup, god bless america" thing is cringeworthy.
l2a3s5 said:
"Took him to a concert, and he tap my knee out of time to the music."
Trashgarbagepail replied:
"F this would be me if I was nervous but on my own knee, if I wasn’t confident in the beat I’m not going to just poke my date. Maybe it was Morse code and you missed it."
"She smelled like soup."
JoeMist said:
"I never dated her, but my family and some guys I work with thought I should go out with the company owner’s daughter. The problem is that she has an absurdly high voice. If we lived in a cartoon, she would break glass every time she spoke. I just couldn’t listen to her talk."
Preposterous_punk replied:
"I stopped being friends with a girl for that reason. She was very nice but her voice gave me a headache every time. I felt bad but just kind of stopped hanging out."
User No 1 said:
"I broke up with this guy in high school because he ate so gross. I’ve never seen someone have their entire hands covered in ketchup after eating a hamburger. I had to sit next to him because I could not watch him eat."
MaximumGooser replied:
"I went on a date with a guy, we got ice cream cones. He let it melt all down his hand between his fingers and just everywhere. He seems silently angry about it too but didn’t do anything to stop it from happening or try to clean it up. Just lick the ice cream as it melts."
"I didn't find his name attractive and was never entirely confident in my pronunciation either."
"She had a rough tooth. Like pumice."
"She lived in Brooklyn and I couldn't be bothered to go there from Queens."
indianamale7 said:
"The first date wears a cowboy hat and pants with fringe. This was in a metro area where that is just laughed at. Home by 9 pm."
DoubleEagle25 replied:
"Yeah, I live in Texas where a cowboy hat, jeans, boots, and a snap button shirt are danged near formal wear. I don't see anyone wearing fringe."
"I broke up with a very attractive woman because although the rest of her was at least a 9/10, the bottom half of her legs (calves and below) were just tapered down to practical sticks. Nothing wrong with her medically, just skinny calves, ankles, and feet. I'm so strongly attracted to legs, I just couldn't proceed with the relationship."
leefi50 said:
"I dated a smoking hot guy, then I found that he was a clown for children's parties and had a collection of clown artwork... no one is hot enough to consider integrating a clown collection into my home, much less a f**king clown..."
frontal_robotomy replied:
"Clown art is no joke. In college, I rented a room in a house owned by a French artist. Mostly did sculptures but for some reason had made a series of clown paintings hung all over the living and dining room walls... Needless to say, I spent most of my time hiding in my room."
"There was a girl I really liked in high school, but I never actually talked to her.
10 or so years after we graduated we bumped into each other at a bar, and started hanging out/casually dating. There were a few red flags that indicated she may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, and then she referred to a mutual friend as “a pompous”.
Not a pompous ass, not a pompous individual, they weren’t acting in a pompous manner. Nope, he was pompous.
And yes, English was her first and only language."
"Dirty car.
It wasn't a beater either. She came from money so her parents bought her a brand new DC2 Acura Integra, and it was trashed by the time we met in our early 20s. food stains all over the seats /carpet, bird s**t had etched the paint, curbed wheels, and a layer of dirt that had multiple birthdays on every surface. I take care of things, cars especially, to a borderline obsessive level so she was simply incompatible being on the other end of the spectrum."
One that splits the room (and according to my friends, my pettiest) was breaking up with someone because they ate toast in bed. Personally, I think it was breaking up with someone because when she lifted her chin, the tendons in her neck stuck out really prominently. Really put me off an otherwise very attractive person.
I went on a third date with a guy to the cinema, and half way through he started singing along to the soundtrack. Bear in mind that I hate it when people even talk to me in the cinema, but I *might* have been ok with it if it had been a musical or something. It was 127 Hours
One that splits the room (and according to my friends, my pettiest) was breaking up with someone because they ate toast in bed. Personally, I think it was breaking up with someone because when she lifted her chin, the tendons in her neck stuck out really prominently. Really put me off an otherwise very attractive person.
I went on a third date with a guy to the cinema, and half way through he started singing along to the soundtrack. Bear in mind that I hate it when people even talk to me in the cinema, but I *might* have been ok with it if it had been a musical or something. It was 127 Hours
