If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you.

I was focused on a superficial level, looking for friends who shared my interests, instead of paying attention to the deeper structure of their personality: the way they process the world, their values, and virtues. Which, to be fair, takes more life experience to perceive than superficial compatibilities.

There are three types of friendship, Aristotle says. The first one is based on pleasure—the way our relationship in high school was all about laughing, or the way you can date someone because they are hot and make you feel good. The second is based on utility—you’re friends because it is useful, because your friend plays drums and you need a drumme... See more

A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them. This was a core idea for us. To whatever extent I assumed I knew who Johanna was, I treated her as something that I could fit in my head — as something smaller than me. But she couldn’t fit in my head, nor I in hers: that was the exciting thing about it. You can only ever know another individual... See more