relationships

Dysfunctional dating protocols have a profound ability to negatively impact the long-term progression of society. If you only care about interacting with others for short-term benefits you can extract from each other, you lose the potential for solving loneliness, building community, or accessing committed support systems. Society as a whole could ... See more

Crushers, the point is, indulge in a funny kind of transference of agency. They appear to prostrate themselves. They gift total power to their crush, invest them with celestial kinds of significance. Your crush, it is tempting to think, could fix you. But in reality, they hoard power. All this wanting exists in their desire. They are unwilling or u... See more

Since the ideal strategy for many singles is to date around enough to find someone worthy of marrying, the “game” is of a finite length. At some point, singles will necessarily have to double down on a date, i.e. , switch to exploitation. If you don’t date around (explore) at all, you may very well get stuck dating (or even marrying or having child... See more

The incentives of dating apps actively discourage building algorithms that show compatible matches, since finding a compatible match means you no longer need their product. You really are put in a room with total strangers, most likely the wrong kind, instead of those with similar interests and values. If you met the right stranger, you’d hit it of... See more

What these fears come down to is a deep false belief that we have to give ourselves up to be loved and to be seen as a caring person. Giving yourself up - giving up your freedom to be yourself and do what brings you joy - is a terrifying prospect. As long as we have these false beliefs - and they might be unconscious - we will likely find ourselves... See more

Sex is weird and disgusting and ridiculous and quite often abused and weaponized and traumatic. But I like it. I like what it can be and sometimes what it is. Sometimes I think it might hold the secrets to almost everything. ... Sometimes it’s just nice to hold someone while they cum, kissing their earlobe and whispering to them yes .

Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.

It should raise a few questions that, if the comments on attachment theory Tik-Tok videos and Instagram hashtags are any guide, the majority of the theory’s aficionados are — it cries for acknowledgement — self-diagnosed anxiouses who found out about attachment theory in the first place because they were anxiety-googling why their crush isn’t texti... See more

The best advice? Act normal, even if you don’t feel like it. Who knows if true love will indeed find you in the end, but it certainly boosts your chances if you can pull off functional optimism. It helps to remember that everyone hates themselves, at least a little bit, and the more you can refrain from projecting that hatred onto the world the les... See more