In ShortVetting a Bull is not a checklist, it is a conversation. State your rules immediately, before you spend weeks getting to know anyone, and then watch one thing: how he takes your no. His response to your no is the vetting. Pushy men reveal themselves in that moment, and so do the ones who agree to anything just for the opportunity. Add the camera rule, and one portable red flag: a man who shows you content of a previous partner will show somebody else content of you. After ten years, that is the entire science.
The internet treats vetting a Bull like airport security, a system of forms and stages and secret questions. After ten years of living this, I can tell you the truth: there is no separate screening step. The vetting is a conversation, and he does not know he is taking the test. Here is exactly how I run it.
Lead with your rules
State your rules immediately. Not after you like him. Not once you have spent weeks building something. First.
Check the boxes asap. Give an overview of expectations and how you want it to go before you spend weeks getting to know someone. Your time is not free, and leading with your rules filters before attachment forms, on both sides. It also prevents the ugly ending I will warn you about further down, the one nobody warns wives about.
“The greatest parts of life are waiting outside of your comfort zone.”
Before the rules themselves, understand whose rules they are: the only rules that matter to me are the ones I make with hubby. My checklist is short, but it is law, unless he and I change it. No single man should come in and make a wife feel she should change anything. If a man breaks one of your rules, it breaks it. That is that. Move on. The more you argue over it, the more likely it escalates and you will all feel worse. Early on I tried harder to convince men. I learned: even if you get past that one problem, it will be something else.
And let me be fair here, because this matters: a man having his own rules is ok. His rules matter as much as mine. A man with standards and limits of his own is usually a man worth talking to, and I respect a clear no from him the same way I expect him to respect mine. That is not the flag.
The flag is which rules he expects to bend. A single man expecting a woman to break rules she made with her husband is not the one. A man once opened by telling me his rules, and his rules could not live alongside mine. By telling me his rules, he was telling me to break mine. That is not compromising. That is asking you to move first, in your own marriage, before he has earned anything.
His response to your no IS the vetting
This is the test, and it runs itself.
Pushy men versus laid back men. The laid back ones are more fun and they have nothing to hide. Pushiness is the signal, and it shows up during the rules conversation, which is exactly why the rules conversation belongs at the start.
The other extreme fails too: there will be men who agree to anything ridiculous just for the opportunity. Neither extreme is the one. Agreement without a spine is not respect, it is hunger wearing a costume.
Now the part nobody writes, and it is the real reason this page exists. A man seems head over heels. Sweet, attentive, patient. Then you say no to something, or he will not comply with a rule, and he turns into every other asshole, calling you and your husband names. It stings. It stings because you were this close to possibly playing with him.
When it happens, and it will, hear me: that man was always going to be that man. Your no is what revealed it. Better now than after.
I never dated before my husband, so I had to build the muscle of saying no to a sweet man from scratch, and it is hard. What makes it possible is knowing there is no scarcity here. There is no shortage of men who will check the boxes for a night. Scarcity is what makes a woman argue instead of moving on. Remove the scarcity and your standards hold themselves up.
