What's a quirk, and what's intolerable?

An episode of Seinfeld focused on the totally shallow reasons why some people choose to end relationships. You know, things like "he picks the green marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms and leaves the rest," or "she doesn't know the theme song from The Brady Bunch." A story in today's New York Times offered another dimension: being repulsed by the stuff your prospective honey may have in his apartment or home that is slightly scary, like a real stuffed seal or a set of aged and fading cartoon print bedsheets. Someone who's downright attractive on paper suddenly looks like a freak.

I found this article very timely, as I recently started dating someone who warned me, before I went to his home, that his place doesn't reflect "him." He'd moved there really quickly for family reasons and thus didn't want to be judged or assessed by it. Well, the place seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but somehow it seemed to make him feel uncomfortable.

To me, this was ironic. What he didn't realize was that since date one, said date has truly been testing my own shallow criteria. Great guy, but wrong favorite ball team, wrong vehicle, wrong music, wrong pre-sets on the car stereo, you name it. I keep wondering when I'm going to totally lose it and go off on him for all of these things that don't really matter.

I have been trying really hard not to blow off potential relationships due to surface stuff. Maybe I've been much too picky in the past, and focused on my own too-exacting standards, to notice that there are some pretty nice guys hiding behind those one or two minor shallow "flaws" I find so objectionable. I have no illusions that I would be able to wean someone off of an addiction to the early years of Full House, but maybe I could tolerate the obsession. At some point, you need to compromise, but somehow I can't seem to find the golden mean. How much must one person compromise?

In the interest of full disclosure, same date noted that I have three litter boxes in one room, for one cat, about three feet apart. I fully admit that it's quirky, but not any more so than my rubber duckies, is it?