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.
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.
