Looking for Alice

1. You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see.


2. You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.


3. You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do

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thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match

There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.

hers is the right attitude: you do not like a category. You like individuals. And you’re not born knowing which kind.

That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.

And now I could sort of gesture at what I liked—kind people who are intellectually voracious and think it is cute that I obsess so hard about ideas that I fail all status games.

I deduced that Johanna was probably an Alice. You can learn a lot by observing how people hang out with their friends. She laughed like a hyena, and they were obsessing over some obscure book, and they were so raw and cute. I’d never been as intrigued by a human being before.

When you talk about people you like, or rather when you talk about that thing that happens between you —you have to transform a very complex impression into a string of words. Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my ex... See more