Transcription
I was 16 the first time I thought I was in love. It was the kind of love that lived mostly in the stomach. Giddy, embarrassed, half laughing at itself. I didn't know yet what love was supposed to be back when it was raw and unadulterated and allowed to just be whatever you wanted it to be. That was before the word got tarnished. Before movies and TV and think pieces and Tik Tok therapists decided what love was supposed to look like.
Somewhere after that, love became a set of instructions. Wait 3 months. Don't text first. Don't text back. Leave before you're left. Want, but not too much. I spent years listening to friends, to strangers, to women on the internet who spoke about men, like opponents to be outmaneuvered, and none of it ever sounded like a thing that I remembered. None of it ever sounded like love.
Fast forward to the summer of 2025 when I met a boy and he introduced me to the series of essays, Looking for Alice by Henrik Carlson. And it might just be the best dating advice I have ever read.
In 1862, Charles Darwin got a package in the mail. It was an orchid from Madagascar with a nectar, which is like the tube at the center of the flower, and the secttory was as long as his forearm. So, he wrote a letter to his friend that said, "Good heavens, what insect can suck it?" He figured that somewhere in Madagascar, there must exist a moth with a tongue long enough to reach the bottom of this flower because the flower wouldn't have grown this long if something hadn't evolved alongside it. And he was right. They found the moth 40 years later.
I think about the orchid and the moth a lot. About what we evolve for and whether we actually choose it or if we're just shaped by it. By the movies, by the sleepovers, by the songs that we would play on repeat at 19 and call it love.
Someone once asked her to sign if she was a lesbian. She said no. She just liked Alice, her partner. A specific woman, not a category, not a type, not woman with strong opinions and good hair, just Alice. And I read that and I thought about every single conversation that I had about what my type was. Six feet, charismatic, funny, creative, the type of extroverted introvert that match my extroverted introvertedness. We love to ask each other what our types are. And that's honestly probably like my favorite type of conversation to have with the girls. We're so good at this. We literally have entire vernaculars dedicated to this. He's a golden retriever boy. He's a Doberman boy. He's a finance bro, but he has like a soft heart.
But all this is completely useless. Not because your standards are too high, but because you're asking the wrong question. This is what Carlson says. The reason so many people are miserable in dating isn't that they can't find their type. It's that they're thinking in types at all. You don't fall in love with a category. You fall in love with a specific weird particular human being. And those are not the same thing. Gertude Stein didn't have a type. She had Alice.
But how do you go about finding your Alice? You go and talk to a thousand people and see if there are any patterns in who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard. That's how you move from vague guesses to true recognition. Here's the math that should terrify you. Carlson estimates that there are maybe 10,000 people on this entire earth that you could live an extraordinary life with. 10,000 out of 8 billion. So when you meet someone that completely rewires your brain. When conversation doesn't just flow but transform. When it feels less like you're talking but more like you're becoming. You can't afford to be casual about it. You cannot afford to play it cool when someone's weirdness matches your weirdness. Gertude Stein didn't play it cool. She just liked Alice.
Speedrun authenticity. There's a scene in this Warner Herdzog documentary where he is filming a prison chaplain. And this prison chaplain is about to watch this young man die by lethal injection. And the chaplain, he's just giving these like stock answers. The Lord works in mysterious ways. We're all in God's hands. These are just lines that he's memorized and said over and over again. And her dog interview cuts him off and asks him, "Please describe an encounter with a squirrel." The chaplain, he's confused, but he answers. He describes a real encounter that he had with a squirrel on a golf course. But within seconds, he is sobbing because no one has ever asked him that before. He had to actually think. And thinking cracked him open.
And this is what you should be doing on dates. Not watching lethal injections, but asking questions. For me, the ideal first date is honestly just a long walk and a late night conversation. I think I know some people love doing activity dates and they love having that like activity as a buffer, but for me conversation is so crucial and so important to getting to know someone and getting to know I just like want to know immediately if we're a good fit or not. And I think the fastest way to do that is through conversation. The fastest way to know if someone is right for you is to abandon the script entirely. Skip the small talk and jump straight into the weird stuff. Save cafe conversations teach you nothing. Be honest. Share the stuff that you usually edit out and see who clicks and who doesn't. Share the inside of your brain and see who wants to live there.
Don't let the group decide. This is the last thing. Toltoy writes about a man named Pier who ends up marrying a woman named Helen because everyone at the party starts treating them like a couple. The hostesses see them together. His friends get excited. Pier himself isn't even sure he likes her, but the whole room seems to. So, he marries her and it's a disaster. Carlson's read on this is that a lot of what we think as attraction to someone is actually just our friends's reaction to them. Your roommate frowns when you describe the quiet one, but your group chat loses its mind over the really hot one, and suddenly you can't figure out where your feelings end and where the groups begins.
So, here's a test. Would I still like this person if nobody in my life reacted to them at all? If your answer is less certain than you like, just notice that. You don't have to throw this person out, but just notice where the feeling is actually coming from. Because sometimes the Alice is the one that your friends can't quite see yet. You see them because you're the moth. Because you evolve for something specific that no one else is looking for.
When you tell your friends who you're dating, you're forced to compress this complex feeling to words and you flatten it. Great relationships are often very hard to explain. They don't fit the typical romantic tropes. They are wonderfully incomprehensible. Ultimately, the fundamental lesson here is that everyone is born with this complex interiority that is invisible to everyone else and to you initially as well. But through trial and error and experimentation, you get a better sense of how this space behaves. Then you can find someone whose inner world could fuse with yours in a way where a is impossible to predict beforehand, b impossible to explain afterwards, and c completely transformative.
So, you do all that. You stop dating your type. You speedrun the real stuff. You find someone who's weird clicks with your weird. Cool. But now what? This is where every piece of dating advice stops. And this is where the second essay begins. Act two, loving Alice. Dtoyki as lover.
There's a Soviet philosopher named Baktine who wrote a book about Dastoyki. It has literally taken me months to finally be able to pronounce this and I still can barely pronounce it, so bear with me guys. But his argument is interesting. He says Dasui loved his characters. Carlson wrote, "Dasuvki treats his characters as if they were full human beings who owned the final word about themselves." Dasui refused to contain his characters inside his own ideas about them. He let them surprise him. He didn't write them as mouthpieces. He listened to them. And Carlson says that is exactly what loving another person is. Love is refusing to fit someone inside the box that you built for them.
Because here's what we actually do. We meet someone. We fall for them. We spend the first six months collecting data and then slowly without realizing it. We stop collecting. We file them. I know that he reacts to this. I know she needs this when she's like that. I know that he's going to say this before he says it. And we call that intimacy. But Bteen would say that's not intimacy. That's a caricature. You stopped loving the person and started managing your ideas of them. And the person is still in there growing, changing, becoming someone you haven't met yet, and you're not even looking. So the moment you go, "Yeah, I know him." You stopped.
Carlson says, "Real love is closer to prompt engineering. You're trying to build situations where the person you love can say something neither of you knew they were going to say. You ask the weird question. You leave space. You let them unfold in directions you didn't predict. And they do the same for you."
Here's a quote from his essay. "A person can't be contained in your ideas about them." This was a core idea for us. To whatever extent I assumed I knew who Joanna was, Joanna's wife, I treated her as something that could fit in my head, as something smaller than me. But she couldn't fit in my head, nor I in hers. That was the exciting thing about it. You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue. If you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise. Love is about being invested in someone's continual expansion. If someone truly loves you, you will grow. You will become someone totally different than who you were when you first met them, and so will they.
Which means a great relationship is not two people who stay compatible. is two people who keep diverging but find ways to meet each other over and over and over again. I think in long-term relationships you can panic when you feel like you and your significant other are growing apart. But I think that's part of the challenge and part of the fun. Carlson, he talks about how he started panicking when his wife and him started be having different interests. She was obsessed with garden design and he got more and more into writing. They were pulling in different directions and he thought like are we becoming strangers? But the divergence was the point when she became someone he didn't fully expect. She became this richer material. She gave him something to push against and he did the same for her. They weren't becoming strangers. They were becoming more themselves because of each other.
I think the Instagram version of a good relationship is two people who become essentially the same person. They mesh together into this one unit. But I think the real version is a relationship that makes two people more distinct, more specific, more fully whatever they actually are.
There's a line in the essay, and if you take nothing else from this video, take this line. He says, "We spoke each other into being." Not, "We fell in love. Not we found each other. We spoke each other into being." That's what the right relationship actually is. Not two finished people who found their match, but two unfinished people who keep making each other through conversation, through crisis, through the thousand small moments of being witnessed into who they are now. You're not trying to find someone to love. You're trying to find someone you can become yourself with forever.
So, go read the essays. They're called Looking for Alice, part 1, 2, and three by Henrik Carlson. I link them below. Read them in order, then text them to the person you're trying to figure out whether to be serious about. If they get it, you got your answer. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you guys next time. Bye.