AAAAAA I MISS VIVI ALREADY AND IM STILL IN CALGARY. I’ll ask her later today if it’s okay to hang out one more time before we leave. I really crave some physical touch from her again. It’s so satisfying to have her lean into my shoulder or have our knees touch or something super subtle but still cutesy. I’m gonna call her today.
But I guess one more recent realization is that relationships are really quite hard. I’ve been on a decent number of “first dates” this year (~6 by my count, even if they weren’t particularly date-y, still an environment to get to know someone new and talk 1:1 for a few hours). Most of the time it’s fairly obvious that there’s zero chance they could ever be my life partner, so I don’t bother getting close. Is this the biggest filter? I guess so? But it feels like there’s so many different filters a relationship has to pass through to be successful. Sometimes, a successful relationship seems even more aspirational than a successful career; but maybe that’s because I’ve made some serious progress on one, and much less so on the other.
Something I’ve been thinking about is what relationships transpose themselves into over time. I guess they often connect on one subject, usually worldview related. Then, what does it transition into? There’s a graph I have in one of my blog posts that depicts this:
But what’s the real implication of this? Shorter conversations, more doing regular life things together? I’ve never gotten to this stage with someone. How does it work? How do we not slowly fizzle out?
Vivi talked about how her brother said that love didn’t exist and that women just marry up and she was so lucky to be a woman. I was confused by this, but I’d also never really formed an opinion on whether love exists; it’s another one of those infohazards that you just have to believe in order to live a successful life. But more broadly, what is love? What are we aspiring to and where do we end up? Putting physical attraction aside, what gives? People tend to roll their eyes when I ask this question, saying that it’s a “you know it when you see it” kind of thing. Alchemy. Magic. Obviously, some part of it is being really, really physically attracted; is it that simple? It’s a necessary prerequisite, but not one which is solely enough.
I think it’s pretty simple; it’s that you optimize for the collective utility function of the partnership. Sacrificing only when its optimal for the well-being of them both and knowing that one’s partner will do the same. And it is complicated. It requires:
- That you know your partner well enough to model their real preferences
- That you care about them enough to do what they’d want even if they never asked for it
- That you trust them to do the same for you (approximately) forever
Doing so puts yourself in a spot to get seriously hurt. Dating is painful, and often, people’s first goal is to minimize the pain and look for dates who fit into your lifestyle — same hobbies, etc. such that the “nice” parts of life aren’t disrupted too much, and you learn to keep your options open for when you’re inevitably ghosted. But this manifests itself further down the road, where after surviving a dozen negotiations already, one is still eternally dreading the next one. There’s a lot of potential downside to dating, and the boundaries and rules serve to minimize that downside. But that’s just not “me”. I always believe that seeking maximally positive outcomes is better than minimizing bad outcomes. In fact, I wrote a 3000 word blog post about it. So, I choose to date selflessly, and optimize our combined utility function from the start, way too early, before the other person does.
The way optimizing a collective utility function manifests to me is that there’s more obligation with love than friendship. I don’t get to spend a lot of ambient time in the mornings/evenings with my friends (although admittedly, they are some of the best moments). I might ask for things from friends, but there’s no real sense of obligation around it, whereas I expect certain things from my partner, like if I text them, they should text back as soon as they’re free, or we should call x times a week. And the contract is more explicit as such too.
Truth be told, I don’t think I’d be much less happy being a big brother to Vivi. I don’t even know what I mean by this but I genuinely just want her to do great things in life. She’s faced so much, never complains about it, actively avoids victimizing herself, and made the best of what she’s given. She’s happy and content in a way that I haven’t seen before. She’s clearly smart. I guess it’s not possible to be a big brother, and I’d really really want to be a huge part of her life (maybe even be her life partner), and I believe that I’m right for her too, so that makes most sense. But if I’m not, that’s okay too, as long as she flourishes. She really deserves so much more out of the world.
She said something that I saw as pretty crazy at the time, but that’s lingered in my mind. “i actually don’t care about cheating. like if you don’t feel fulfilled with me and you get that with someone else but you treat me the same why would i be upset” I guess in some ways it makes sense in some ways; if it doesn’t change the way I’m treated, then why would I care? But in other ways, it does feel like a betrayal; if I’m not fulfilling my partner, I’d want them to tell me, and I’d work hard to fix it. This process is endearing only if both partners participate and invest. If they felt the need to get fulfillment from somewhere else, I’d be quite disappointed; what’s the foundation of our relationship in the first place then? Is the switching cost to re-roll a new partner too high? Everyone says, “You can’t get everything from one person,” and I personally never thought I would. There are times when I need a candid friend, so I go to my most candid friend. There are other times I need a listening ear. So I talk to my dog. My question was more, what are the things I need to get from one consistent person? I don’t want to say marriage is about possession, because that’s not a very utopian thing to say. But isn’t it the basis of romance to say: I prefer you above all others, and I want you to prefer to me above all others?
“What is marriage for?” is a very important philosophical question even if you don’t care for philosophy at all because almost everyone not only has to confront it through the course of their lives, but has to contemplate it and ultimately take a stance.
Love is so weird. We’re the first generation that ever gets to choose our lovers from a population by compatibility, rather than by need. Darwin spends five billion years optimizing your genes for reproduction, and God laughs and decides that whether or not you find your person will depend on which badminton club sessions you go to, or whatever.
Relationships are incredibly hard. But what keeps me going is to always believe in love one more time, and always one more time.
(I would like to preface this by saying that this has nothing to do with recent events, but rather a conversation with E.)
I think one of the best quotes I’ve ever read is this: that aspirants who make a change who “are motivated by proleptic reasons, acknowledged defective versions of the reasons they expect to eventually grasp.” Decisions tend to be better/worse for reasons that you don’t understand when making the decision.
This also extends to my favourite positive redpill; that there exist joys/experiences in the world that you cannot even conceive of existing because your current model of reality doesn’t allow for it. There are pleasures which you cannot even proleptically dream of.
I’ve seen this advice just about everywhere, it’s the same for career; but for relationships, wait but why has a great explanation (one of my favourite blogs, but it’s often too verbose since it’s intended for the average reader; I prefer more technical writing like that of Scott Alexander).
I would also add to the list of unhealthy societal pressures is the idea that you must “pick a life partner” and that if a relationship ends then you “got it wrong”. Why not just enjoy a relationship for as long as it’s comfortable and appropriate for both parties? And if a relationship doesn’t last a lifetime, was it a mistake? I think the question that starts all good relationships is: Can I make someone happy? Making someone happy doesn’t imply forever, or as happy as they can be, or happier than anyone else could make them. A compliment makes a person happy. A text where you share something fun. Being a good listener on a date even if you didn’t blow their mind with electric conversation. A cuddle makes a person happy even if it stays a cuddle.
Something E said was
I guess finding a partner is interesting cause the entire pursuit (at least the way I’m going about it i.e. not 1 night stands) designs the thinking to be long-term. so you think about these compatibility questions, vs. when making friends you never do that; you just keep talking and interacting, and if it’s good, the relationship will get forged stronger, and if it’s not then it won’t.
I used to be unequivocally the same. But now I believe that there are many romantic interactions that are short of your wildest dreams are still worth having, that make two people happier than they would have been alone. I went from from “date to marry” only to something more like, date for fun, with a high degree of possibility of marriage. As in, if there’s zero chance of marriage, it’s not worth the time; but my threshold has lowered significantly, and goals shifted. What’s ironic is that the people I know who have wives all got to know each other without such a massive amount of pressure from the get-go; it’s a lot to ask of someone so soon. Meeting people is fun and it’s actually pretty enlightening to know the range of people/personalities that exist. It’s weird to assign a completely binary outcome to what is a spectrum; I guess I’m still firmly in “date to marry”, just with a lower threshold on that spectrum. Dating for the short term legitimately doesn’t make any sense. The emotional damage involved in getting intentionally but temporarily attached to another person sounds torturous and counterintuitive on a fundamental biological level.
It’s now 12AM. I called Vivi for an hour or two, it was a pleasant call; felt very ‘everyday life’. I really like how open minded she is. Maybe this is what being a bit more companionate is? I don’t know.
At one point, she told me what a Daruma was; it was a Japanese doll with two eyes, one of which you fill in when you think of a goal, and the second of which you fill in when you’ve achieved the goal. It’s like a physical representation of your journey. I really like the idea — I tended to do these things with expensive materialistic items. I bought my MacBook and bike after I achieved goals. But this is much easier to keep track of, not to mention economical. She said she had none of the eyes filled out and I was somewhat meming when I said that in a meta sense, she should fill out one of the eyes as a goal of filling the rest out.