love and dating

Falling in love seems to happen mostly either by a process of osmosis or simple familiarity (and a lot of waiting) or by setting intentions of seriousness and weeding out partners who don’t share them. Sometimes, it happens randomly. Sparks fly. You’re reminded why there’s so much poetry, so much music, so many stories, so many cautionary tales... 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.

We are a living record of every interaction that fate has had us bear witness to. Love is not just a chance encounter that we hope to come across once or twice in our lives, it's the nuance that shapes the hidden layers of our story. Meaning care, or lack thereof, will manifest in varying aspects of our day to day.

Why did we start to... See more

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... 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.