Anything — even the most pleasurable activity — feels like work when you are (or make yourself feel) obliged to do it, and do it a certain way. You’re much less likely to find happiness if you reduce people to checklists and comparative columns in an excel sheets, where they have to get a perfect score with zero slip-ups to make the cut. It’s setting oneself up for disappointment, and also possibly the nasty discovery of finding yourself to be on the reject column of the spreadsheet of someone else you like. Of course there are options and one has to narrow them down somehow, but you’d be better off with negative dealbreakers (“I absolutely cannot ever live with someone who is short/racist/doesn’t read/doesn’t drink green tea 8 times a day” — whatever they are) and select rules. Yes, relationships take effort. New ones even more so. But you never know at what level you’ll connect with someone, or whether you’ll still have this same order of priority of things in ten years. Happiness often awaits in unexpected corners. Be smart, but also allow some serendipity to happen to you.