People use these two words as if they were interchangeable. They are not, and the confusion between them is responsible for a surprising number of relationships that look fine on paper and feel wrong in practice.
A type is who you are pulled toward. It is largely automatic, mostly about temperament, and it operates before you have decided anything.
A standard is what you have decided you will not live without. It is deliberate, it is about behaviour rather than chemistry, and it holds up under boredom.
One is a magnet. The other is a floor.
When a relationship ends badly, people usually revise the wrong one. They conclude the type was the problem and go looking for its opposite. Quiet instead of intense. Steady instead of exciting. The change lasts a few months and then the pull reasserts itself, because a type is not a decision and cannot be overruled by one.
Meanwhile the standard, the thing that actually broke, goes unexamined. It was never written down, so there was nothing to hold anyone to.
The useful move is the reverse. Leave the type alone and get specific about the floor.
Most stated standards are too vague to fail. "I need someone who communicates" is not a standard, because nobody thinks they are a bad communicator. A standard is only real if you can imagine a specific moment where it is violated.
Compare these:
The versions on the right are testable within a few weeks of knowing someone. The versions on the left can be debated for two years.
None of this means your type is a flaw to be corrected. There is usually something sensible buried in it. A pull toward intensity often comes with a real capacity for depth. A pull toward calm often reflects an accurate read of what you can actually sustain.
The trouble starts only when the type is doing the job the standard should be doing. Chemistry is a poor screening tool because it arrives early, feels like certainty, and says nothing about how someone behaves in month eight.
Held together properly, the two work as a pair. The type tells you where the pull is. The standard tells you whether to follow it.
Write two short lists. On the first, the three qualities that reliably attract you, described as temperament rather than looks. On the second, three behaviours you have already learned you cannot live without, each written so a stranger could tell whether it happened.
Then look at your last relationship. Almost always, the first list was fully satisfied and at least one item on the second was quietly missing from the start.
That gap is the whole problem, and it is a far easier thing to fix than your taste in people.