Looking for Alice
Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. Stein answered no, I just like Alice.
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 inverse 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.
if you take [jelly fish] out of the water their entire form disappears, like when an unspeakable truth is lifted up out of the silence and expressed as lifeless gel, yes, they’re untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.
Dostoevsky as lover
[paywall]
Relationships are coevolutionary loops
“Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.”
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
When I meet a person who is truly, profoundly themselves, I sometimes think of a letter Charles Darwin sent to Joseph Hooker in January 1862 after receiving a package of orchids.
“Good heavens,” Darwin wrote about the Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary as long as his forearm, ”what insect can suck it?”
There must exist a pollinator moth with a tongue longer than any that has ever been observed, he conjectured later. The moth and the orchid must have evolved in dialogue.
This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.
When I think about it, the speed at which we updated early on was probably more important than anything else. Iteration speed is key when you deal with feedback loops of this kind, when you want to figure out how to best understand and interact with an emergent reality. The best scientists aren’t those who are the most intelligent; they are the ones who tweak their theories further than others, in close contact with experimental reality. The most valuable startups didn't start with product-market fit. They kept learning and adjusting at a faster pace than those who fell behind. The same can be said of relationships. You need to keep a certain rate of improvement for things not to break. If you are too slow in adapting to each other, you grow apart. If you speed up your iteration speed, you can go places you wouldn’t have guessed possible a priori. My life, at least, turned out much weirder than I had planned.