modern love
*modern dating
modern love
I 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 someon
... 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 jud
... 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.
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
I deduced that Johanna was probably an Alice. You can learn a lot by observing how people hang out with their friends. She laughed like a hyena, and they were obsessing over some obscure book, and they were so raw and cute. I’d never been as intrigued by a human being before.
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
And now I could sort of gesture at what I liked—kind people who are intellectually voracious and think it is cute that I obsess so hard about ideas that I fail all status games.