- It is worth committing to the bit, to the experiment, of dating a person. This is the right way to approach a potential relationship, to not waste either of our time with indecision and undercommitment. Playing the field is exactly the wrong attitude to bring. The right attitude is that this person is worth my time to see who they are and if we click. That means reserving the time to get to know them and allow the space in my life for a relationship to grow into. If I can't bring that attitude, if I am not willing to create that space, then it's not worth going on a date with this person. Others may not see things this way, and that's fine—though it may be disappointing.
- I can't love a person I don't know. I may enjoy her company and appearance and way of being, and enjoying her that way is an excellent reason to get to know her, but I can't love her until I know her. It's just a paradox in terms; love requires understanding.
- Knowing someone properly requires specifically looking to find out who she is, what she wants, the people and places and things that matter to her and why.
- Unfortunately and despite my best wishes, knowing someone takes time. As revealing as our words can be, still we reveal more of ourselves through our actions. We as people get more comfortable with each other over repeated encounters. We can always try to know each other better faster, but there is a limit to how well we can know each other this way. Understanding takes time. Love takes time.
- I only need to "succeed" once, at least in theory, and the "better" I "succeed," the better off we both are. I meter success in terms of the closeness of the resulting relationship, the emotional intimacy created, and the capacity for resolving conflicts. It is worth doing things with high positive variance as long as I do it eyes wide open to the short-term negative variance. Despite being scary and painful when it doesn't work out, it is worth sometimes being dramatic.
- Don't take love advice too seriously unless it comes from someone who achieved what I want to achieve. For me, that's a happy stable marriage with kids.
- Corollary: If I were a reader of this post, I wouldn't take my points here as advice. It's not intended as advice. I consider this my 15 theses about how I want to live. Don't take any of this as advice; please go write your own theses on dating!
- Dating apps suck. Everyone hates them. They aren't worth using. They are mostly an exercise in futility, false hope, and discouragement. Sometimes a person gets lucky and dating through an app works out somehow in a healthy happy relationship — [REDACTED] are an example — but it is just about the the most brutal unrewarding grind I can imagine. Investing in apps means exposing oneself to the kind of people who use apps to date — the timid, the gutless, the conventional. It means selecting for predominately people I don't respect who also don't respect me. It means selecting for people who are looking for the "best" "deal" they can get — persons with a transactional view of dating. Fuck that.
- I am curious to discuss with [REDACTED] why he used an app and why he thinks it worked out in their case.
- A doubt: They may be conventional now. They could change. I am changing.
- There is no checklist or filter that will pick out precisely or with high recall the people I could have a healthy relationship with. Attempts to filter on "having things in common," or avoiding certain differences, or to legibly qualify a person, lead to stupid outcomes and fragile relationships — because differences can always arise. The person I start dating may change over the relationship — because of it or in spite of it. I can't rely on commonalities to continue or differences to remain distant. There is no substitute for direct personal interaction and shared understanding through communication.
- There are, to a first approximation, only three things that matter for relationship success:
- Do we like and respect each other? Do we enjoy each other's appearance, company and personality display? Do we see this as a relationship worth working for?
- Are our life circumstances compatible? That is: Can we meet up and have a good time often enough to form a relationship?
- Are our life goals compatible? Are we happy to make them so?
- Lots of things people think should matter in a relationship don't matter, except inasmuch as they affect 9(a, b, c).
- There is no One (right match) for anyone. There are Many.
- Communication and common cause beat all.
- Nobody owes anyone anything ever. We can still feel upset over it and make hard decisions if our needs aren't met and communication breaks down or proves ineffective. If we don't make those decisions, then we are instead choosing our current circumstances.
- The stories we tell ourselves and each other about who we are and where we are going are far more interesting, revealing, and worth paying attention to than the kinds of dull facts that easily fit into an app profile.
- Where there's ambiguity, there's promise — at least until I've made three reasonably-spaced overtures that did not pan out. Then it's time to move on to other prospects.