love and dating

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

Prioritizing pure feeling, so the idea goes, leads to people choosing bad, unsuitable partners, to acts of desperation and violence, to shirking your duties. That love can also be an incredibly redemptive force meshes uneasily with our sense of individualism, with our Protestant ethics. Controlling it requires an entire normative framework.

The irony of organizing your life around mistake-avoidance is that, rather than making you feel calmer, it keeps you in an anxious state, ratcheting up the stakes of your life until you’re moving through it like you would a decision tree, each notable occurrence redirecting you toward a different destination. We’re meant to be. Wait no, we’re doome... See more

But that’s online dating, I’ve always thought: random and chaotic and terrible and weird and then — with time or patience — transformative.

The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. We choose each other again and again, and so create a community of two.

I told someone recently I was looking for love who responded “in this economy?" I feel pathetic admitting this, someone else texted me, but I want a boyfriend. When I scroll through TikTok, skinny women wearing sweatbands dole out romantic advice: if he wanted to he would, no sex until the third date, how to get him to commit, red flags, green flag... See more

The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you ... See more

I’m always thinking about that Raúl Zurita quote that people put on Tumblr: Toda declaración de amor es urgente porque vamos a morir [every declaration of love is urgent because we’re going to die]. In real life, obviously, you cannot declare love to just anyone. You have to go with the flow, wait on other people’s time, accept their ambivalence, t... See more

Looking for love sounds more like chasing the high of an extreme sport, trust falling with someone you don’t really know like that. It demands exacting reciprocity, extreme vulnerability. It brings out people’s basest and most primal instincts and a frightening desire to merge into someone else. When the girlies on TikTok talk about dating, they ra... See more