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

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

the answer cannot be to retreat from relationships. It has to be to take them more seriously. To kill that urge to run and avoid. Because we’ve got two choices here—crumble under the weight of this thing or go all in, against the odds. Forget pretending that love and family aren’t important, that they are oppressive, that loving ourselves is... See more

Like metal cooling in a new shape, your expression, posture, even the cadence of your speech start to carry the imprint of the one who sees you.

There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.

the quiet work of intimacy: to hold someone so they can grow into the silhouette your love sketches for them, and to feel your own edges soften and bend beneath the steady pressure of their gaze.