The phrase “out of my league” sounds like it belongs on a baseball scoreboard, not in a candle-lit bar where two people are trying to decide if they want another round. Yet we keep the phrase alive because it gives us a tidy alibi: if someone dazzling says yes, we can shrug and call it a miracle; if they say no, we can sigh and call it physics. The hidden assumption is that somewhere, in a secret ledger visible only to the universe, every human has been assigned an integer value. A seven can date a seven, a nine can date a nine, and the moment a five aims higher, alarms should blare.
But walk into any restaurant on a Friday night and you will see the ledger is missing. The couple laughing over under-seasoned pasta does not look like matching numbers. One of them might have the symmetrical face we were told to covet; the other might have the kind of smile that makes you forget to notice symmetry at all. They are not auditing each other’s flaws with a pocket calculator. They are doing the much simpler math of “Do I feel lighter when this person walks in?” If the answer is yes, they keep showing up. If the answer keeps staying yes, they call it love.
Normal people, the ones who do not moonlight as talent scouts for a runway show, do not carry a clipboard of prerequisites. They carry stories. They remember who called after the funeral, who shared the last slice, who sang off-key without apology. Attraction becomes a slow accumulation of these remembered kindnesses, not a balance sheet of cheekbones and waist-to-hip ratios. The moment you decide someone is “too much” for you, you are usually judging yourself against a collage of magazine covers and movie stills, not against the living person who is currently bad at darts and good at listening.
We also overestimate how visible our own insecurities are. The curl you hate in the mirror is barely a blip in someone else’s peripheral vision; what they see is the way you throw your head back when the joke lands, the way you pause to greet the dog tied outside the café. Those micro-moments are the currency real people trade in. They are not convertible to a ten-point scale. They are valuable because they are specific, and specificity is never out of anyone’s league.
Dating, at its least cynical, is just prolonged eye contact that turns into inside jokes. The people who seem “above” you are tired of being told they live on a mountaintop. They want a flat place to set their drink and someone who will ask about the scar on their knee. Offer that flat place, ask about the scar, and you have already disproved the league system more effectively than any manifesto could.
So the next time you catch yourself ranking a stranger on an imaginary chart, remember that the chart is written in pencil on a napkin that is already soggy with condensation. Rip it up. Order another round. Let the evening decide what you’re worth to each other, and let the accountants stare into their empty ledgers, wondering where everybody went.
