On dating, love, and romance in this tumultuous and conflicted world we live in.
On Choosing a Partner
Posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
In my teenage years—in tandem with all the other naïve and absurd thoughts that used to inhabit this mind—I approached every potential relationship believing that it could work irrespective of the circumstances. Likely merely a subconscious response to ameliorate myself from the persistent sting of loneliness, I blinded myself to the glaringly obvious unanswered questions: Have I spent enough time with this person to truly know anything about them? Do I truly know if they feel anything for me in the first place? Have I devoted any time to think about what I actually intend to do with this relationship? Over time, as I became disillusioned by the harsh reality of human nature, whether preemptively realizing the incompatibility or thwarted by the sting of rejection, I became cognizant of this blatant ignorance. I subsequently conformed to the conventional perspective of determining a romantic partner—concocting absurd requirements and exactifying the specific traits that one should possess, conceptualizing abstracted caricatures of others through ideal types, drawing countless arbitrary boundaries and assigning red flags to any undesirable action, and obsessing over the circumstances that precede any form of relationship.
It was only until recently that I questioned these meticulous standards and arbitrary requirements: why should I pretend that I understand this volatile and capricious heart? Why should I act as if I knew with any degree of certainty if a relationship would truly work or not? As if I understood human chemistry, as if I comprehended the intricacies of each interaction? As if I knew precisely the emotional reactions that would ensue? As if I could predict the future—the aggregate outcome of each and every event that would befall us? Why persist in this façade, going against every principle and lesson that I’ve ever internalized in my life? Why make an exception for our natural inclination to believe certain things—our unreliable intuition and our haughty sense of judgment—when time and time again it has proven itself excessively prejudiced and wholly presumptuous? Why do we pretend to know, when, constantly deceived by our emotions and our myopic worldview, we know virtually nothing?
Knowing what I know now about human nature and the human condition, could I be so oblivious to blithely approach any human interaction, romantic or platonic, expecting the other person to be perfect in any conceivable way? To have neither flaw nor fault in character? To have neither scar nor blemish? To have neither trauma nor vice? Insofar as we want a relationship to reflect the same values as we would life is general, the solution is neither to remain oblivious to another’s flaws, nor is it to manufacture absurd standards believing that doing otherwise is settling for less. In the same way that suffering is an indispensable component of a fulfilling life, imperfection is an indispensable component of a fulfilling relationship. It is what gives it color and shape, a mission and a meaning, a story and a purpose.
To give someone the benefit of the doubt—to eschew our spurious preconceptions of relational compatibility, to lay bare the ignorance and whimsicality that resides in our hearts, to be tolerant, sensitive, and empathetic towards another’s deficiencies—is to let our stories pan out beyond the first chapter.
Posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2023
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Posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2023
The Heart
Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Ever since I started this blog six months ago in December, there’s no question that I’ve fundamentally changed. In everything that I do, I am able to think with clarity in perspective and reason, to hone my words with sharpness in focus and intent, and ground myself in truth and purpose. For virtually my entire life, I’ve been subjugated by the thought of failure and loss, of inadequacy and hypocrisy, and of purposelessness and inconsequentiality, whereas now I have little doubt in terms of what I’m meant to do in this life of mine; I am at peace with the thought of death; I am unperturbed by the notion of suffering and strife. My emotional volatility is generally very low. In the vast majority of circumstances, whether in work, daily life, friends, or family, I am content, stoic, and grateful that I’m able to be here at all, even if to suffer.
But there’s a part of me that hasn’t changed. There persists one catalyst in particular that has never failed, and continues not to fail in instigating a relentless and inexorable chaos within my heart—love. It merely takes a few fateful encounters with a special person, one fleeting moment of eye contact or physical touch, or a couple intoxicating thoughts of possibility as an impetus for this disconsolate, sulky heart to spur it into an irreversible, frenetic spiraling into utter chaos, impelled by quixotic tendencies and an undeniable, ravenous desperation for love. Despite all the progress I’ve made cultivating the mind and however much I perceive that I’ve fundamentally changed internally, I am still far too easily blinded by love. Compared to my past self, while I think vastly differently, I’ve come to the realization that it’s not as if I feel any differently. It’s only now that I feel in my rational mind as if I’m an innocent bystander to this chaos, witnessing the storm brewing in the distance. Do I view it with disdain or with awe? With contempt or with appreciation? With fear or with hope? No matter what I think, no matter how much I try to reason with this insolent and tumultuous heart, I will never prevent the unpreventable. I will nevertheless become helplessly stranded amid this raging ocean, swallowed by this sea, and the feeble comfort of this rationality—viciously wrested from my consciousness by the inexorable pull of this whirlpool of emotion.
Though what is most peculiar is when I juxtapose this chaos with the aforementioned resilience that I’ve recently built up in this state of mind; this acute self-awareness and this ability to at any moment detach—however momentarily—from the chains of my present circumstances combined with a tumultuous stream of emotion creates within me a strange duality of truth. It seems that at the center of the pursuit of a life well lived lies this fundamental ambivalence of human nature, wherein the consciousness seems to be stranded amidst an unceasing tug-of-war between the heart and the mind. It seems that the meaning of life remains suspended in limbo; is it an unending war, or is it a dance with possibility?
There exists no doubt in my mind what I’m meant to do—what I’m supposed to do and what is deemed reasonable. To fall in love with someone I know nothing about? Absurdity. To incessantly envisage emotional intimacy and connection? Delusion. To believe that they just might be the one and only? Stupidity. In my mind, I know with certainty there is a cost. I know there is a risk. I know it will subjugate and oppress me. I know this frenzied desire and unleashed emotion will derail all semblance of rational thought and my life purpose. But the heart remains unperturbed by the fact that I have more important work to do in this life, unfettered by the notion that I might just be making a fool of myself, unfazed by the very distinct possibility that these feelings are all but an elaborate delusion. In the heat of the moment, disoriented and dazed in the midst of all the confusion and the cacophony, desperate and distraught from all the uncertainty and indecision, nothing—nothing feels more right, seems closer to an ultimate truth than the mere prospect of love.
Blinded by love, coaxed by possibility, determined to find redemption, there seems to be no doubt in my heart, either. There persists an irrefutable yearning ensconced within it—an inexorable desire for passion, for love, for chaos. The frenzied rush of sex, the unmistakable warmth of two souls inextricably locked in an embrace, the invigorating sensation of a reckless wander into this war-torn and ruin-strewn battlefield of emotion. If I said, from the absolute depths of my heart, that I don’t long for the radiant warmth of another’s heart, that I don’t yearn for another’s grace enveloping my consciousness, that I don’t crave the taste of soft lips and the invigorating gaze of a lover, that there is no ravenous beast of lust and desire lurking within me, that I am not completely and utterly starving for love, there would be no greater lie to have come out of my mouth.
Have I starved myself of love far too long? Are my emotions indeed delusions? Or are they shrouded avenues towards a greater truth? As much as we try to psychologically detach ourselves from the inexorable chaos outside our perception, as much as we try to understand—relentlessly and meticulously peeling away at the seemingly innumerable number of layers of reality that constitute an ultimate truth—there seems to be nothing more undeniably real and irrevocably true than our feelings and emotions. The pure, unfettered joy of eating when famished, drinking when parched, resting when exhausted, the warm comfort of a mother’s embrace, the relentless gravity of a lover that tugs upon our hearts, the searing pain of smoking hot oil splashing onto our skin, the visceral panic when a large animal charges at us—what are they but atoms scattering haphazardly in space? What are they but players in this nonsensical game we call life? But in that moment before our minds can rationally justify how we feel—regardless of whether we want to feel those emotions or not—we are one with the chaos.
But the more I contemplate this ambivalence between the heart and the mind, the more I am convinced that this ambivalence is the point. After all, if I cannot control my emotions, what am I, but driftwood in an incomprehensibly vast ocean, ceaselessly tossed by the waves and dragged by the currents? What am I, but a ravenous predator in a desperate pursuit of a meal? Or am I the prey of such a beast, merely awaiting an inevitable fate? And if I cannot experience my emotions, what am I, but a faceless and featureless entity, a cog in an incomprehensibly complex machine, an actor in a plotless play? My mind reorienting itself in a state of emotional chaos—should it be akin to a policeman catching a thief red-handed? Or should it resemble a shepherd guiding back sheep that have been led astray?
To fall in love and find nothing—there exists no greater waste of time, energy, and attention. But to fall in love and find love—there exists nothing quite as momentous, visceral, and irrevocably true. And I speak as if I had a choice between them—as if any semblance of reason survived to discern which is which. In many ways, this inability to discern and this revocation of agency in my emotional state has been tormenting my mind for the past month. But after many long days of emotional carnage and the attrition of reason, I’m realizing that perhaps there is no reason to fight. Perhaps the point isn’t to change the way I feel—to shut out these absurd thoughts, to reprogram my emotional disposition, to regulate how I should feel at all times. Lest I forget that my heart has its reasons of which my mind knows nothing, and that the heart, like any other source of suffering and grief, is also an indispensable source of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
I didn’t choose to feel this way, as I didn’t choose to suffer, either.
But perhaps, the point is not being able to choose at all in the first place.
But if I did have a choice, would I still choose to feel this way?
Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2023
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- if nothing else, I love youOn dating, love, and romance in this tumultuous and conflicted world we live in.
- the heart and the mindThe human condition is ruled by this tension between the heart and the mind, between emotion and reason, between the incessant waves of our thoughts and the tugging tides of our intentions.
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More on emotion vs reason · love→Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Soulmate
Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
The term soulmate is frequently misused because most people either ignore or misconstrue the notion of the soul; their form of love is corporeal, not spiritual, meaning that their feelings of attachment toward another is inextricably linked to aspects of their physical being. If you fell in love with someone you were convinced was your soulmate, married them, but suddenly their soul was transported into a completely different body, would you love them in the same way?
I will be the first to admit to this mistake, construing multiple people I’ve fallen in love with in the past as my soulmate, despite not knowing anything about their soul—the very essence of their being, all the stories that have shaped their consciousness, all the minute foibles and idiosyncrasies all the fears and dreams that reside within them, all the things that make them who they are. Had I not been so excessively infatuated—enamored by the grace of their body language, by how apparently adorable they seemed, by how my heart felt when I caught a glimpse of their smile—there would likely be no semblance of emotional connection in the first place.
But this subconscious bias toward physical appearance is merely an extension of the normative modes of judgment we use to navigate nearly any social interaction. In much the same way as we do with romantic partners, we just as easily make baseless assumptions about pretty much anyone that we come across in life. What sorts of conclusions do we draw about a person’s character if they’re morbidly obese or underweight, if they’re much shorter or taller than average, if they dress poorly, if they speak with an accent or have bad pronunciation, if they walk with an odd gait, if they’re physically or mentally handicapped, or if they have a certain skin color? Or maybe they just have strange idiosyncrasies that are completely out of their control?
We’re far more likely to get a job, get into a relationship, and open ourselves up to far more opportunities if we’re conventionally attractive and if we don’t deviate too far from the standards of what is deemed normal. Not because it definitively proves anything about our actual job performance, our ability to love, our character, and who we are, but it proves something about our desire to fit in, to conform, and to do what we’re told.
Rationally, it makes completely no sense to judge someone’s worth or someone’s relevance to our lives by their physical traits. But if you asked most people if they judge others in this way, very few would admit to doing so, perhaps out of self-delusion, perhaps out of an ever-growing progressive cultural battle against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Much like the notion of unconditional love, since I don’t believe it will ever be possible to uproot this subconscious bias (to an extent, I believe that it’s potentially even dehumanizing to do so), the best we can do is create a kind of cultural awareness of it; we must be constantly conscious of it in ourselves and in others in every interaction we share, especially those that determine the fate of others’ lives.
It is perhaps the greatest unspoken injustice built into the very nature of our being. At the same time that we almost unanimously internalize the validity of the basic human right of equality of opportunity—when we ostensibly recognize the worth and significance of a human soul beyond what we can physically perceive—we’ve likely simultaneously formed thousands of ill-informed, irrational subconscious judgments for all the people that we’ve encountered thus far in life. For everyone that we didn’t take the time to get to know, we were probably wrong about all of them.
This is all a long way to say—let’s not bastardize or banalize the notion of a soulmate; we need to recognize that this form of love isn’t something commonplace, something we perceive on a whim, or an emotion that just comes and goes. While I suppose the concept of human love stretching beyond the physical realm can exist, coming to any solid conclusions is nearly impossible, as it is likely beyond our comprehension of the metaphysical. When we’re so predisposed to weigh our perceptions of the physical world over the elusive, almost imperceptible concept of a soul, declaring that someone is our soulmate is to take an extreme leap of faith for ourselves, let alone for the other person involved.
Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
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Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
Natural
Posted on Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
I’ve always found it particularly interesting that some may find it rational to justify the overly high standards of modern dating culture—the preemptive raising of “red flags,” absurd and arbitrary perfectionist demands in physical attractiveness, characterological traits, and for the entire dating process from start to finish to be free of discomfort or strife. Many still seem to justify it as inherently natural, framing it as a cold calculation innately wired into our biology as a means of carrying out natural selection—to find the best possible partner for reproductive and generational success.
But all too often we forget that within our modern world—characterized by endlessly complex social constructs, caste systems, convoluted norms, and nonsensical rules that arbitrarily determine reward and punishment—very few things we do are truly natural. Since society probably hasn’t existed long enough for us to fully adapt our psychology to it, there are a myriad of tendencies that have persisted in our biology that are ultimately counterproductive to our success within a system that is inherently artificial. Natural selection simply doesn’t work the same way it used to; if one of the main purposes of society is to ensure the safety and prosperity of all its constituents, the implication of this is that the majority of those with seemingly undesirable and counterproductive traits can and will pass on such traits. How do we determine the efficacy of certain traits within this context? Do selfishness, hate, deceit, pessimism, haughtiness, pride, obstinance, temperament, irrationality, and irascibility—all arguably very natural and instinctive traits possessed by human beings—serve to augment or diminish the prosperity within this world that we’ve meticulously designed?
We’ve already decided within the construct of society that basic human decency requires that we are patient with one another, that we help those that can be helped, that we build one another up even despite our deficiencies. We’ve already decided that survival of the fittest—perhaps the most natural process there is in the order of life as we know it—isn’t anything that remotely resembles an ethical strategy; we‘ve already decided that it isn’t acceptable to just leave homeless people to perish and rot on the streets; we’ve already decided that eugenics is wrong—that we shouldn’t just kill off everyone that committed a crime or suffer from a mental illness to forcefully prevent them from proliferating their deficiencies. If we can agree on this, why do we persist in our hypocrisy? Why are we shocked or aghast when we discover that someone has some degree of undesirable traits? Why do we suddenly turn a blind eye to our responsibility as human beings when it comes to choosing a romantic partner? Why do we spurn our coworkers and our colleagues, our classmates and our teachers, our friends and our acquaintances, or mere strangers when they end up acting in dishonorable or detestable ways because of flaws in their character?
May we refrain from using our flawed and unstable notion of what is deemed natural to justify our wrongdoing merely when it is convenient to do so. Human civilization at this point is too far gone at this point—our worldview, our conception far too dissociated from the evolutionary underpinnings of our psychology. The rules of the game have changed—our conceptions of right and wrong, our awareness of humanity's collective consciousness and mutual prosperity, our understanding of role, responsibility, and reward in the intricate world that we’ve crafted for ourselves. We must constantly put to trial our instincts, our intuitions, our feelings; to think that they always act in our favor, to think that our lizard brain truly understands the artificial world that we live in, would be perhaps one of our greatest blunders.
Posted on Wednesday, June 14, 2023
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Posted on Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Added in 2026
Along the same lines
- A Certain Vibean essay
- The Heartan essay
- The Fragility of the Churchan essay
- Love and Circumstancean essay
- Unconditional Lovean essay
- On Choosing a Partneran essay
- Soulmatean essay
- You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say t…Matthew 5:43-48
Added in 2026
Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?
Time is too slow for those who wait,
too swift for those who fear,
too long for those who grieve,
too short for those who rejoice,
but for those who love,
time is eternity.