love and dating

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... 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.

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

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

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... See more

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... See more