I hate to weigh in with more criticism here, but I've also noticed this idea of putting up a long list of requirements on ACX threads and it struck me as rather self-defeating - to imagine that you can usefully define 'dealbreakers' in advance and screen people out, or do Zoom calls as the first date instead of in person dates etc.

'Tell vs Ask culture' is a great idea and I am fond of telling things too. But telling only works if you can, in fact, 'tell' something - unfortunately, when it comes to romance, "we know more than we can tell". I mean, we live in a world where Mencius Moldbug just got married to a Bard-graduate Peace Corps feminist sex writer for Jezebel! (I can also name among my relatives the improbable pairing of an ardent vegan and her husband, a butcher; decades later, still no sign of divorce.)

It is a trite saying, but it looks like "the heart has reasons reasons know not", and this catchphrase must be added to the armory along with "the dodo bird verdict" or "the metallic laws" or "correlation!=causation". I would highlight the studies (excerpts):

Background:

To summarize: everyone agrees on who's hot or not, and it is better to be hot than not; past that degree of assortative mating, predicting pairwise success of romance appears to be essentially impossible.

I'm particularly impressed by Joel et al 2017, where participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions (many extremely similar to what 'date documents' record) first, and past the global 'hot or not' ratings everyone could agree on, they throw high-powered random forests at trying to predict pairs of men/women, and the pairwise random forests do not merely fail to add much predictive power, they actually make the predictions worse! I, uh, did not predict that.

If you can take hundreds of participants filling out hundreds of tailored survey items about all their preferences and ideals and desired traits of romantic partners, and our highest-powered statistical methods identify less than zero signal, and this is also consistent with other analyses like asking whether your preferences predict satisfaction with partners (apparently not!), then I cannot see any reason for optimism about 'dealbreakers' existing and being so important you should structure all dating based on it. They would appear to be highly negotiable; perhaps true dealbreakers exist only in retrospect (such as at workshops or couples consulting therapists in the middle of messy breakups). Note the pernicious learning problem here inherent to screening: how will you ever learn you were wrong to screen out someone based on a supposed 'dealbreaker' if you screen everyone that way? It's not like you (or anyone else) will randomly pick half to go on a date with anyway and diligently acquire a sample of a few hundred n which can show that the two processes have the same (low) success rate for additional dates/relationships...

If neither you nor anyone else can predict your actual romantic compatibility with a random person beyond the basics of assortative mating, no matter how many questionnaires you fill out or dealbreakers you list, because you will 'click' with whomever you click, and that's the end of it, no point asking 'why', the heart has its reasons all your dealbreaker reasons know not, etc, then it seems like one ought to be thinking of dating as a numbers game in finding the maximum of n draws, more like the lottery of apple breeding than filtering airplane flights on Travelocity looking for the perfect flight with zero layovers leaving at noon for $200. When better-than-chance screening is expensive (or impossible), then there's not much you can do but grow a big field of apple saplings, give each a bite, and wait to get lucky with the next Honeycrisp apple; if you aren't sampling hundreds, at a minimum (a normal max looks like a log), you're throwing away a lot of potential gain. The last thing one would want to do is to self-defeatingly throw away lottery tickets based on criteria that won't matter in the end - each one of them could've been Mr Right, no matter how you defined and discarded him as Mr Wrong.

(For the same reason, I am skeptical of attempts to do 'Zoom first dates': Zoom is, even at the best of times, alienating and hard to feel any real attachment through. It may be adequate for cold business transactions, but for love...? I think that, like VR for decades, the screen resolution and latency and jitter are simply not there yet, and even something like Project Starline may still be inadequate. So using Zoom may doom a first date that could've succeeded, and is worse than dealbreakers because it throws away lottery tickets while wasting a lot more time & effort.)