Is Emotional Maturity the New Dating Requirement?
These days, emotional maturity is one of the most talked-about qualities in relationships. Scroll through dating profiles or listen to conversations about dating, and you’ll hear people saying they’re looking for someone emotionally mature, or wishing their partners would learn to be. Emotional immaturity, meanwhile, has become a widely accepted dealbreaker, as well as a source of frustration.
Some surveys show that women rank emotional stability and maturity among the top three traits they look for in a potential husband, though men value this quality highly too. In a more recent survey of daters, emotional intelligence was rated the number one trait people were seeking in a partner. One even found that 83% of respondents considered emotional maturity more important than physical attraction.
But here’s what I’ve been wondering: have we turned a reasonable expectation into an impossible standard? Are we asking for something we expect to find already assembled in others, when most of us actually develop these emotional skills through relationships themselves?
For something we talk about so often, emotional maturity is not easy to pin down. Those surveys rarely define what emotional maturity actually means. Despite its popularity in everyday conversations, it’s not a consistently studied or clearly defined concept in psychology either. If you look at psychological literature, you won’t find much under emotional maturity. Browse blogs and articles by mental health professionals, and you’ll find no shortage of differing lists and interpretations of what counts as emotional maturity.
And that matters. Because when someone says, “She’s so emotionally immature, I can’t do it,” or “Emotional maturity is non-negotiable for me,” it’s worth asking what they mean.
In conversations, social media posts, and blogs, emotional maturity shows up in different ways. For some, it means not avoiding uncomfortable emotions. For others, it’s the ability to manage distress without lashing out, or to communicate without becoming defensive. It might mean self-awareness, empathy, consistency, accountability, or simply staying in the room when a conversation turns difficult. I even came across one definition describing an emotionally mature man as someone who doesn’t expect his partner to mother him.
To be fair, these are reasonable expectations. And research backs this up. Traits such as effective emotion regulation, empathy, and self-awareness are linked to higher relationship satisfaction, whereas behaviours like silent treatment, defensiveness, emotional unavailability, and avoiding difficult conversations predict lower relationship quality.
But what began as a healthy value in terms of emotional maturity seems to have, in some cases, turned into an unrealistic expectation. Today, emotional maturity gets tossed around so much and with intense emphasis you'd think the ideal partner should arrive fully formed: perfectly attuned to their feelings, calm under pressure, endlessly available, and capable of articulating their inner world with flawless precision. We forget that most of us grow within relationships. The emotional maturity people want in a partner is usually built through relationships, not before them.
Maybe this pressure to show up emotionally “finished” reflects a deeper cultural anxiety. Relationships feel more precarious now. Dating feels transactional. And social support networks have shrunk. As a result, we’ve begun treating romantic partnerships as high-stakes personal investments. If you’re going to let someone in, the thinking goes, they’d better be emotionally ready. But that mindset risks turning relationships into performance spaces, not places for mistakes, growth, and repair.
And this inflation of expectations isn’t limited to emotional maturity. A studypublished in Science Advances, analysing online dating markets in four major U.S. cities found that both men and women routinely pursued partners about 25% more “desirable” than themselves. Not only that, but users tailored their messages depending on how “out of their league” a potential partner seemed. The authors concluded that reaching for partners more desirable than oneself isn’t an act of rare boldness, it’s the norm.
In other words, we’re not just expecting kindness, empathy, and steady emotional self-regulation. We’re also collectively chasing people higher up the desirability ladder, adding even more pressure to the already overloaded list of expectations we carry into modern relationships.
When we frame emotional maturity as a static trait, it turns into a filtering tool. Swipe left if they don’t meet the standard. And while that instinct is understandable, especially for people exhausted by past disappointments or uneven emotional labour, it overlooks the truth that emotional maturity is relational. It’s built, tested, and deepened through connection, not in isolation.
I also think we’re collectively anxious about relational risk. If people no longer stay in relationships out of duty, necessity, or social pressure, which, to be clear, is a good thing, then the stakes of choosing the “right” partner feel higher. Emotional maturity becomes the ultimate hedge against future heartache: if I pick someone emotionally skilled, maybe I can avoid the pain I’ve known before. But no partner, no matter how emotionally attuned, can protect us from every disappointment. And no amount of personal work can fully prepare us for the unpredictable vulnerabilities of intimacy.
The reason why women are particularly expecting emotional maturity in a potential partner might be related to being conditioned to shoulder the emotional labour in relationships: soothing tensions, anticipating needs, managing conflicts, intuiting moods. Although this trend is changing in certain cultures, there is still an imbalance. And research suggests that emotional work carries a heavier psychological toll for women.
Women might be expecting (and needing) a level of emotional fluency that many men weren’t socialised to develop due to traditional gender norms. But that doesn’t mean women are inherently more emotionally mature than men. As Pragya Agarwal argues in Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions, the idea that girls are naturally better at emotional skills than boys isn’t supported by solid evidence. Agarwal writes that the differences we observe are largely socialised, not biological.
In fact, while men and women have roughly similar emotional capacities such as emotional intelligence, they don’t always express or deploy them in the same ways. For instance, many men tend to hold traditional gender beliefs such as restrictive emotionality, aggressiveness, and avoidance of femininity. As a result, they tend to experience lower levels of empathy, self-disclosure, and communication.
So, when women say they want an emotionally mature partner, I believe what they’re often asking for is someone who won’t leave them carrying the emotional load alone. Someone willing to engage in the necessary work of self-awareness, being in touch with feelings, and not running away from conversations.
Gender conversation aside, it might be worth shifting the question. Rather than asking “Do they have it?”, maybe a better question is “Can we do this work together?”
And before placing these expectations on others, it’s worth turning inward. Are we emotionally generous? Do we own our patterns? Are we willing to tolerate discomfort, admit when we’re wrong, and stay engaged when things get difficult? The demand for emotional maturity in others makes sense, but it should be accompanied by a commitment to nurture it in ourselves as well.
We’d also benefit from slowing down and getting clearer about what we actually mean when we talk about emotional maturity. It’s easy to toss around phrases like “emotionally unavailable” or “emotionally immature” without asking whether we’ve articulated those expectations clearly, whether they’re realistic for where someone is, or whether a relationship might allow both people to grow.
Because while it’s fair to want a partner who can handle their emotions, take responsibility, and stay present when things get hard, it’s equally important to ask whether we’re holding others to standards we haven’t fully met ourselves.