love and dating

love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.

We all carry endless hidden selves and... See more

Romanticism has a way of slipping past even our most carefully built walls of principle. We like to believe we choose our attachments rationally, by ethics, timing, circumstance, but real longing rarely respects such boundaries. It arrives uninvited, sometimes at the worst possible moment, and exposes how fragile our convictions become when touched... See more

To be known is to be seen. You bring out a different side in yourself when you’re with that person. Some people make you more talkative, more secure, more experimental. In Winterson’s The Passion, Henri says this about love but I think it’s just as resonant of friendship: It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to... See more

Being a romantic means being brave. To offer something to someone, with hope — the hope that they will like it. To show someone who you are by making something that only you could make. To be extra, to choose to build something extra. To manifest things that are strange and unexpected and surprising…

These acts can feel wildly vulnerable and... See more

I’m not surprised that people are wrestling with what it means to desire someone different from them. Since the rise of dating apps, singles—instead of coupling up with people in their social bubble, who are likely to be similar to them—have become more likely to date across race, education, and religious lines. This is a big societal shift, but... See more

Psychologists generally agree that similarity isn’t a good predictor of romantic compatibility. Nor is “complementarity”; opposites don’t necessarily attract. Gaps, then, aren’t a hugely helpful frame with which to consider relationships at all. And besides, isn’t it a bit navel-gazey to think so much about yourself in comparison to others? Freud... See more