love and dating

Prioritizing pure feeling, so the idea goes, leads to people choosing bad, unsuitable partners, to acts of desperation and violence, to shirking your duties. That love can also be an incredibly redemptive force meshes uneasily with our sense of individualism, with our Protestant ethics. Controlling it requires an entire normative framework.

Being a romantic means being brave. To offer something to someone, with hope — the hope that they will like it. To show someone who you are by making something that only you could make. To be extra, to choose to build something extra. To manifest things that are strange and unexpected and surprising…

These acts can feel wildly vulnerable and frighte... See more

Writer Heidi Priebe on love and grief:

"As long as there is love, there will be grief. The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved.

As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love's natural continuation. It shows up in the aisl... See more

The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. We choose each other again and again, and so create a community of two.

To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

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

We are a living record of every interaction that fate has had us bear witness to. Love is not just a chance encounter that we hope to come across once or twice in our lives, it's the nuance that shapes the hidden layers of our story. Meaning care, or lack thereof, will manifest in varying aspects of our day to day.

Why did we start to over-romantici... See more