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.

3 items with this tag.

  • The reactivity ratio limit in relationships

    An obvious condition for a relationship to work, and some non-obvious consequences.
  • Courtly Love

    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.
  • The Odds are Good & the Goods are Great

    Update in 2025: I endorse this 75% as much as I used to, but I still endorse this essay's main thesis.