"Looking for Alice"

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice

Dating advice which feels refreshing.

My main takeaways:

• Introduces a concept of "pattern matching" -- during the process of learning what you are looking for in a person, gradually narrowing down your criteria and choosing to spend more time in spaces where the people who fit your criteria are more likely to be. It's something I've been already doing but it's nice to hear it affirmed. It's also a good reminder to be selective about what spaces I spend my limited time and energy in (not just for the sake of potential romance, but also for generally developing connections with the people I will most likely resonate with.)
• Emphasizes the importance of lowering your filter when engaging with someone ("jump directly to the strange parts"). Showing someone how you really communicate, what your real interests are, and how your mind works will make it clear more quickly whether you are compatible.
• To me, this has been resonating with the idea of organically getting to know someone over time before introducing a tone of romance. I find myself asking -- how do I know if I want to enter the tone of romance with someone, until I get to know them a little bit? Sometimes, the simple act of going on a proclaimed-romantic date with someone feels like too much of a declaration, and forces the pressure of making a decision on whether to continue the romantic tone. I may feel some interest in someone, but not want to make that declaration until I get to know them a little bit more. When it's more obvious that there is romantic potential, then it would be time to request a formal date.

Notes I took while reading

• The way I found this article -- for some reason, I wanted to search for indie web dating advice, so I found an indie web search engine: https://searchmysite.net/search/?q=dating
  -> first result was this article https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice
  • looks like a cool site(blog). I'm sold after reading the first couple sentences of the article
• can't believe i found this by some random indie web search site with the keyword "dating". I feel like this is the perfect article for me to be reading right now and it's so good.
• Also, "Escaping flatland" is I think the name of the blog. I assume it's a reference to the flatland book? (which I recall was a lot about dating? i should read my highlights)
• " I don’t know much about dating. The reason they ask me is that I am a nerd and I am married to Johanna. Johanna is an Alice. That is: she is a singular human being, that I happen to love."

  • point i think: the person you end up with will be the right person in a unique way to you. perhaps a sense of loving/dating isn't really defined/clear until you meet that right person

  • "Don’t assume you know what you’re looking for"

    • "thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match for the particular type of individual I resonate with"
    • Feels like this article is really hitting a need I've been having for a more analytical (or just explained out in a more analytical way) approach to dating.
    • "So what do you do? You go talk to a thousand people (increasingly less randomly sampled) and see if there are any patterns in who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard. And then you start hanging out with people like that."
      • I love this. Resonates with my thinking. So good to hear it stated. I feel like most of my dating experience has still been in the mostly-random mode. That's kind of how it felt at the beginning with pretty random dates from dating apps. Then branched out to trying to meet ppl IRL at meetup groups. A lot of my journey has been narrowing down what groups to try out / what spaces to spend more time in.
    • Overall point here is that you learn what you're looking for by meeting diverse ppl and then narrowing down that search by what feels right/important for you.
      • my own song lyric: "as your shape takes form, I'll learn to recognize" 😃

  • "You can’t afford not talking to Alice"

    • (Alice is essentially a placeholder name representing "the person that is perfectly right for you")
    • "I’d never been as intrigued by a human being before."
      • It's rare for me to meet someone like this (Which in the context of this article (especially "i'd never been') means that I simply haven't met my Alice (or possible contenders for Alice) yet) (or perhaps my Alan because I am looking for a man. (just to be clear.))
    • "And the thing is, there aren’t that many people you can have an amazing life with. Maybe 10,000, spread unevenly across the globe? ...the number is small enough that you can’t afford to be casual about it. You have to never let someone like that pass you by."
      • "[that] you can have an amazing life with". <-- good reminder. that is the goal. it takes time to know if a person is someone you can have an amazing life with. It's easy to judge things after spending only a short amount of time together with a person. You can't really know if they could be a long term partner until spending a lot more time together.
    • "I spent the next eighteen months trying hard to make her feel like I wasn’t obsessed with her, though I stopped to talk with her every time I saw her—in the supermarket, at clubs, in the street. We had a lot of fun; she wasn’t into it."
      • I am so riveted by this story. At this point I am gasping, like, we know she is going to be his life partner, but eighteen months of pursuit and she isn't into it?
    • "But if the energy is Alice, you should also not drop it."... "When someone you resonate with is reluctant, you have to be alert to moods. Make sure you are the one that backs off before they do. Signal that what you like is this particular thing right here right now, not anything that you are hoping to game it into. And don’t flirt. But keep talking."
      • Not quite sure what to make of "don't flirt"
      • also not quite sure what to make of "signal you like this thing right now"
      • But, I think it's good advice to focus on talking as the signal and interest-engine rather than other forms of flirting.
      • Also includes a caveat that they are not advising being stalker-ish and creepy. They are saying to continue pursuing someone even if they are reluctant, but only if you "are the one that backs off before they do"... I feel it might be a hard line to draw. And, how much time can you spend on a person when they aren't displaying interest? But then again, I suppose we are talking about a very specific case where this is a person who seems to very likely be the kind of person who you strongly resonate with. It's not just a "oh this person seems to match my vibes and I'm attracted to them", it's more of "oh my god this person clearly matches the criteria I know is right/important to me, and they are incredibly interesting to me, and I feel infinitely wanting to talk more to them and learn about them, and there is also reciprocation in conversation and interest" (not sure about that last part ("and interest") as applied to the author's story, because "she wasn't into it")

  • "Speed run authentic"

    • "She was more fascinated by the fact that, unlike all the other twenty-three-year-olds who didn’t know what they were talking about, I wrote about the thoughts that passed through my head as if my thoughts mattered, unironically... 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."
      • Feels good to have this surprise benefit come up for writing in this digital garden! Extremely validating.
    • "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 invert 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. "
    • "...speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts."
      • I'm definitely guilty of sometimes not talking about certain interests/hobbies early on
    • "speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts. There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good)."
      • Always a good reminder that I do indeed want to filter out the ppl who aren't a good fit, and the only way to really do that is being fully myself and communicating that self as best as possible. (obviously there's a line here of not oversharing / overwhelming at the wrong time)
    • "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 out, helps you become."
      • #3 is: looking for mutual growth
    • "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."
      • has an example from the documentary Into the Abyss about making a guy break down crying by asking him to expand on his stated interest in squirrels.
      • I like this as a conversational skill to develop + one that I kind of already have. Being able to find a thread in what the person has stated which you can follow and expand on in an interesting way. Get them talking. I see how it's important to get someone out of the stock/default question/answer sequences. I do also just love going deep and seeing someone's thoughts on things. (It's also one of the things that makes a date interesting even when you're not sure if it's really going anywhere.)
    • "Or you can prompt them by yourself going into uncharted territory, perhaps thinking aloud about something that confuses you. "
      • TODO: Linked article to read: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs
    • (on having this type of conversation) "But when I do it with Johanna—especially in the first few years—it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux."
      • very romantic / idealistic sounding, but I love the concept of this one person just absolutely being uniquely captivating. I'm not sure if this article is making me more confident in what I'm looking for, or simply more deluded in finding "that perfect person" that will never really exist --> The question I find myself asking when I have these thoughts: Is it even worth having a long term relationship with someone if they aren't making me feel this way?
        • but also have to not fall into the trap that just because someone doesn't feel this way at first, doesn't mean they never will.... But also, this article is kind of proposing that you would realize pretty much right away. ?? maybe. (definitely saying that in the context of this type of conversation but also kind of overall too, upon immediately meeting someone. the cohesive point here i guess is that when you meet someone who seems interesting, do this type of deep conversation, and it should give you a decent idea if they have that special uniqueness which strongly resonates with you)
    • "That open conversational space, which is the heart of our relationship, is not something I can explain; it is not something I knew I was looking for; I’m not even the same person after having been there. It does not look anything like I imagined a relationship would or should look."

  • "It is easy to get swept up by other people’s opinions about the people you date"

    • It can be challenging to communicate/explain a relationship/date to other people, especially when there is a unique quality to it that doesn't follow common tropes. Because ppl may not understand the uniqueness, "This will tilt the playing field against incomprehensible, singular, and deeply personal relationships." --> be aware of how that social dynamic affects you, i.e. just because it's hard to explain the quality/uniqueness of the person to your friend, or if they don't see "it", doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue it
    • Friends opinions can make you confused. Give an example from War and Peace (which I'm currently in-progress reading at the time of reading this article) !!!! --> When Pierre and Heléne meet, everyone is so excited and happy about them, which doesn't really match Pierre's true experience, but he is confused/overwhelmed by the supposed rationality of it and so agrees to the marriage.
      • (I remember reading that part and being like, oh no pierre, what are you doing, you literally are thinking so strongly about how you know she is not a good match, and then you marry her anyway.)
    • "letting the feelings of others decide who you get attracted to"
      • I feel i need to think through this and monitor moving forward to make sure this isn't happening for me

  • (Ending summary of article): "
    What I’m saying is this:

You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see.

You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.

You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do it.

But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.
"
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• From comments section
  • Henrik: "I have masks. And I also think authenticity is a slippery idea—I don't think it is precisely that you have an authentic core. Your core is shaped by the people you talk to. But there is something like a seed--it says, oh with these people I feel slightly more alive, doing these things I feel more alive, reading these books, and as you move toward those things you gradually change into something that feels more "authentic", more distinct and different etc. Do you have anyone where you feel more spontaneous and yourself? What other friends does that person have? Do you have any hobbies where you feel more yourself -- what if you go deeper down that rabbit hole? It wasn't seamless for me, though pretty fast: I realized as a (very lonely) teenager that writing made me feel alive and started seeking out those scenes and tried out a few until I found some where I felt really excited, and there I met my wife etc."