modern love
*modern dating
modern love
My catchphrase on this topic is “Ease can be exciting.” I think that with the right person, you can get both the butterflies and the calm, even though we’re told they can’t coexist. That, to me, is magic: the presence of both thrill and stillness. Sometimes you have to do some math to get there.
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
If this is a dream I would want to dream it all over again. I would want to go back to sleep right away. I wouldn’t believe real life could be any better than this is. I would say has this really been a dream? Because I wouldn’t believe I’d have the presence of mind to conjure all these conversations with my friends that go places that I don’t
... See moreThe 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
True love is correct attunement to somebody.
(Alain de Botton)
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.
Henrik Karlsson • Looking for Alice
When you love someone, I think the question that you ask is: can I help them be okay? Can I make their life better without ruining my own? What can I do to be there? To me, the heart of love is the acknowledgement that we have little control over how other people live and yet our fate is bound up with theirs. S is not the only person I feel that... See more
Ava • no exit
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
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I think I secretly prefer treating decisions like irreversible trapdoors. There's a deep relief in having no choice, an absolvement of responsibility. But the truth is that the things that define our lives - our habits, our identities, our relationships - are choices made daily, continually.
Isn't that what defines the romanticised ideal of love that lives in my head? That it's a choice? Every day, every word, every action? We forget that love is a choice because it feels more like gravity. Things fall; why shouldn’t we?
Nobody has to show up with roses, peel fruit, or sacrifice their precious time for another human being. Nobody has to suffer through the weird way you eat or the annoying jokes you make. Nobody has to wake up in the middle of the night, paralysed in fear for the heart they've given away. Yet we choose to anyway.
It's scary to realise that someone could do so for 10 years straight and simply wake up deciding not to make the same choice anymore. And people do. With friends, with lovers, with life itself.
Love is a hundred thousand little and big choices. That's what makes it special, that we can spend a lifetime with someone, across thousands of mornings and kisses and still look forward to the next one, across a thousand annoyances and struggles choose to wake up and do it again, every single time.