love and dating

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

I want something quieter and harder to counterfeit: the intensity of attention that notices the quiver of a wrist when reaching for a glass; the presence that enlarges an ordinary afternoon; the appetite that doesn’t require catastrophe to be vivid. I want Romanticism stripped of its operatic melodrama, no consumptive poets dying by candlelight,... See more

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.

A great relationship is not only finding the person you have fun with, but also finding the person you want to be bored with. The beauty of long-term relationships is often hidden in boring, ordinary moments.

Becoming a vehicle for capitalistic desires of abundance and overconsumption. We’re asking, what would an underconsumption-core of love look like? What if we could take only what we required in the moment, better able to understand ourselves and our needs in the context of the present?

Ideally, the next fall is the last one and it lands somewhere soft.