Feels weird writing about dating. It’s a topic where everyone loves to talk and few people have anything useful to say. But I had an unusually high number of long term relationships into my twenties (in parallel, because poly), most of them pretty wonderful in different ways, and as a result I feel like slightly confident spewing my takes on the internet.
I think the applicability of those takes is quite limited, because I’m a weird person (low extraversion, high openness, low agreeability, high neuroticism, queer but in a “I’m 30% the type of straight guy disliked by the most typical queer person” way) with unusual dating filters. I feel like what I have to say is most useful to young women with male-typical autism. Everyone else, I’m not sure what you’re getting out of reading this.
Last year, I ran a Twitter Space titled “I interview people (you, maybe) about the ick”. I defined the ick as a sudden drop in regard or attraction based on something seemingly trivial the other person did. It might happen on a date, in the early stages of a relationship, or when your cute coworker does something at work Then I asked: What’s the first time you can remember getting the ick? When did you last get the ick? Do you know of a time someone found you icky? What’s the most memorable tweet you’ve seen about the ick? What ick tweets are memorable (according to various terminally online people, three quarters of them men)? I got the ick when I saw a guy running into a screen door I got the ick at the beach when I saw a man in the ocean getting knocked down by a wave …when I was feeling threatened by a guy in the subway and I saw another man who wasn’t helping me …when he took his wallet out of his pocket and a bunch of coins fell out …because he couldn’t find a parking space …when I saw that my wife had a ‘go bag’ and was prepared to leave me at any given moment …because he’s trying to change lanes and he can’t because the cars won’t give him a gap …because he kept rolling his dice off the table during a board game And what icks did my interviewees actually have? I interviewed 14 straight(-ish) men, 5 straight(-ish) women, and one gay guy.
My introduction to courtly love was reading a Diana Wynne Jones novella (The True State of Affairs) that made no sense unless you know what courtly love is. After crawling confusedly through ancient Livejournal reviews to piece together what the story had been about, I took away that it was a weird medieval knight thing where you talk a lot of guff to a (married) woman without ever expecting it to turn into more than what it is.
