đź’ˇ on modern love
aka dating in your thirties
đź’ˇ on modern love
What was the goal of experience, aside from some feminist reclamation? It was an attempt to encounter as much of the world as possible, to soak up otherness and change as much as we possibly could; part of the inadequacy of living in this pursuit was the futility of trying to escape ourselves. “We really wish to be multiple,” Greif wrote in 2005.
... See morethink about the moment you fell in love, not the garbage dating app performativity, but the real thing.
nobody instructed you:
“care for this person.”
“rewrite your routines to include them.”
“let your guard down.”
lol. if someone tried to tell you that explicitly, you’d run.
what happened instead was enchantment.
you saw something that shifted the axis
... See moreI keep thinking about this Gillian Rose line from Love’s Work: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless.” Love necessarily involves exposure and damage. But another word for damage might be change, or expansion. Falling in love with
... See moreI used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s
... See morerelationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.
If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before . If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
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
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
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.