• I’ve been reading The Vital Spark by Lisa Marchiano and really enjoying it. It’s very similar in tone to Women Who Run With the Wolves, if you enjoy that.

  The mythic banishment of Lilith speaks to a universal truth. There are qualities such as kindness, empathy, and agreeableness that can help us get and stay connected with each other, and there are fiery qualities such as anger, shrewdness, and forcefulness that can help us get and stay connected to ourselves.”

  Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves,” according to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Staying cut off from our vitality is a form of anesthesia.

• Why do high agency people put themselves in low agency situations? I was puzzling over a friend of mine who is incredibly capable but consistently chooses to be in relationships where their competence is just… not useful. Then I realized I have my own version of this. I suspect that many of us do. It’s a strange paradox—you know you’re able so you take on difficulty, and you can’t quite make the connection that you’ve consciously chosen to be in a situation where you have little to no leverage. We all choose the ways we are trapped and the ways we are free, and I’m starting to believe a certain type of high-functioning person is irresistibly drawn to making themselves artificially low-functioning. Mirages and oases look similar for a reason, in other words.

• Most people don’t have a type. I find this to be very true in matchmaking: the people most likely to find awesome partners they’re happy with tend to have about two or three things they really care about, and they don’t sweat the details at all.

  But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay). The person you spark with might be too tall or too short, or be a dog person to your cat person, or have an extremely boring job. Even so: They might be just your type.

TECHNOLOGY

• Dwarkesh profile in NYT!

• I just want to take a moment to solemnly promise that no part of Bookbear Express will ever be AI generated. You’re here for the artisanal emotional angst, and I plan to deliver :)

• Kevin Kelly on uncertainty.

CULTURE

• The Japanese designers reshaping menswear. I, too, love Auralee and have a take on Evan Kinori and shop at C’H’C’M’ and generally know a lot about menswear. Mostly because I am a control freak. I will not be elaborating.

• I did not know about the concept of the kunstlerroman! But it is relevant to me!

• On Marilyn Monroe. On my coffee table I have a copy of the 1962 Eros volume that contains The Last Sitting (the last pictures taken of Marilyn Monroe before she died). This essay does a great job of describing the photos, which are beautiful, strange and sad.

  In the pictures, Marilyn sports a peroxide bouffant and modish makeup—white eyeshadow with a heavy crease line, a colorless lip. Monroe was drinking heavily during the shoot, and her eyes bear a glazed expression, gauzy and vacant. She wears costume jewelry, scarves, and little else. Modern sensibilities cast these photos in a different light—how ethical is it to take nude pictures of someone so drunk?—as does the fact that Marilyn crossed out many of the images on the contact sheet, drawing great big red Xs over photos where she looked tired, or where the camera captured the scar that ran across her abdomen from an endometriosis surgery. But the portraits are transfixing, precisely because they show her famous fragility on display. Her skin is papery and loose; she has deep lines at the corners of her mouth; drugs and grief are aging her hard. And still, she is magnetic, radiant.

Roy Oxlade, Rose and Old Clubs, 1984

1. If you want to be more perceptive, Occam’s Razor helps a lot. Every time someone does something you’re even slightly confused by, ask yourself, What’s the most straightforward theory for why they’re behaving like that? Why does Mary seem to dislike Jeff? Why is Tina so anxious when the subject of Jenna comes up? Why does Marissa consistently date guys who suck? The answer is usually surprisingly simple, but most people never even bother to come up with a theory. If you keep theorizing and testing it against reality, eventually you’ll develop a great intuition.

2. Being comfortable in large groups and parties is just a learned skill. For many years, I identified as someone who was very comfortable in one-on-one settings, but unsure of how to socialize in groups. Then I started hosting more parties and events for work and realized I’d mythologized this “comfortable in small groups/comfortable in big groups” thing way too much. It’s literally just a thing you teach yourself how to do. Assume a normal and friendly affect! Talk to people sincerely and unpretentiously! Circulate! If needed, break it down into a set of procedural steps—this is how I enter a conversation with a group of people I don’t know, this is how I leave the conversation when I’m bored.

3. Not everyone needs to like you. In fact, people are allowed to dislike you for dumb reasons—projecting their own insecurities, completely misunderstanding you, whatever. It is in your best interest to just let them dislike you. In fact, being secure in yourself and comfortable with being disliked will actually make you more likable.

4. All the popular dating advice out there is advice for anxious women. If you are an avoidant woman you should not be taking this advice. In general, hyperfixating on any particular dating advice is likely lead you down the wrong path.

5. As a reformed people pleaser myself, I ardently disapprove of them. Constantly repressing your true desires in order to “please” someone else leads to worse outcomes for everyone involved. However people pleasing is an deep-seated addiction and you have to accept that most people are just Stuck That Way. Focus on rectifying your own people pleasing tendencies instead.

6. When multiple people say the same very bad thing about someone, it’s best to take it as true and avoid them. I don’t mean, like, they’re difficult to work with or they’re a negligent boyfriend or whatever—I mean that they’ve hurt someone in a way that’s beyond the pale. Back away slowly.

7. People who lack discernment will cause you a lot of problems. They’ll date annoying people, work with annoying people, befriend annoying people, and if you are sufficiently close to them you will be impacted by all of this.

8. Try to be dispassionate in your assessments of people, but forgive them easily. Life is easier when you let people be who they are instead of resenting them for it.

9. If you think you lack discernment because you always end up enmeshed with questionable people, what’s likely going on is that they are bristling with red flags and you ignore every single one because your family of origin or previous romantic relationships have conditioned you to see them as normal. Try to identify someone who is more relationally discerning than you and think deeply about what they index on.

10. If you think of someone, text them :)

11. Don’t let not texting someone back for a very long time stop you from doing the above.

12. If someone is avoidant, let them avoid you. Check in at a reasonable interval to let them know that you care.

13. Be gracious, even when you don’t have to.

14. From Codependent No More: The surest way to make ourselves crazy is to get involved in other people’s business, and the quickest way to become sane and happy is to tend to our own affairs. When someone asks for your advice, it’s fine to give it. But I recommend only giving them further advice if you notice them actually listening and implementing what you’re saying. Otherwise you will become as crazy as they are.

15. If someone is in a pretty good relationship and you think it’s not the perfect relationship for them, Do Not Say Anything. If someone is a definitively bad relationship, Say Something Once. Then move on.

16. I find the mentality of “your critics are always right” to be very helpful. Try to find the grain of truth in what people say about you.

17. At the same time, what you think of yourself is ultimately more important than anything else. Our culture castigates people wholesale and then forgets about it six months later. Opinions come and go, but self-regard persists. If you don’t like yourself you will punish yourself in cruel and unusual ways.

18. Rejection is protection. Seriously. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but once you get it you really get it.

19. Conflict can become really fun once you get it right! Conflict can be incredibly painful when you get it wrong. Don’t let the excruciating pain turn you off conflict—passionately disagreeing with people is what makes life worth living.

20. Try to see it from their perspective. Even if they’re obviously wrong and you’re obviously right ;)

21. Resentment happens when you’re unwilling or unable to stand up for yourself. Instead of fixating on how someone else is letting you down, examine how you’re letting yourself down, and change your behavior.

22. Glennon Doyle: “Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

• A quality I find very attractive in people is a sense of lightness or mobility. It’s the opposite of stagnancy, of being paralyzed and bogged down by your problems: the ability to shrug off the heaviness and keep moving forward. A perpetual willingness to try a new experiment, a different angle. Most of the time when someone tells me they’re trying very hard to solve all of their problems I’m like “It really seems like you’re only exploring 20% of the options available to you.” But it’s like they can’t see the possibilities, or just reject them outright. When someone is truly creative about all areas of their life it strikes me as both cool and very rare.

• I read Codependent No More, which Ben has recommended to me a million times. It’s very good! Melody Beattie’s definition of a codependent is “one who has let another person’s behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that other person’s behavior.”

  I believe that clutching tightly to a person or thing or forcing my will on any given situation eliminates the possibility of doing anything constructive about that situation, the person, or me. My controlling blocks access to my higher self. It blocks other people’s ability to grow. It stops events from happening naturally. It prevents me from enjoying people or events.

  Control is an illusion. It doesn’t work. We cannot control alcoholism. We cannot control anyone’s compulsive behaviors. We cannot (and have no business trying to) control anyone’s emotions, thoughts, or choices. We cannot control the outcome of events. We cannot control life. Some of us can barely control ourselves.

  People ultimately do what they want to do. They feel how they want to feel (or how they are feeling); they think what they want to think; they do the things they believe they need to do; and they will change only when they’re ready to change. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong and we’re right. It doesn’t matter if they’re hurting themselves. It doesn’t matter that we could help them if they’d only listen to and cooperate with us.

  Ben’s takeaway from this book is that it is selfish and bad to try to help people and you should stop. (This is a very Ben thing to say, by which I mean somewhat hyperbolic). I think the real problem that I sometimes succumb to is an issue of confusing control with care. People do what they want to do, and one of the easiest ways to escape from accountability for our own lives is to take on responsibility for other people’s actions. Because they need us; because they tell us they need us; because they are self-harming or making questionable decisions; because they are lonely or struggling or sad. Because their suffering makes other people around us suffer, because we love them so dearly. Because we need them. Because we want, very sincerely, for them to be happy. This is all very good and noble—this is also, generally, a way to not confront the question of what we ourselves want and need.

  From the book: “I don’t trust people who never get mad. People either get mad or get even,” my friend Sharon George, who is a professional in the mental health field, said.” I’ve found this to be very true: when I abandon myself, certain elements of said Self tend to resurface at inopportune times in amazingly inopportune ways. Have you ever behaved in a way that you would not have previously imagined yourself capable of? In my experience, this tends to not be an issue of self-control so much as me consistently and forcefully negating needs that Absolutely Refuse to be negated. In other words: if you don’t take care of your Parts, your Parts will take care of you. And you may not like their methods.

• Having a body is supposed to be fun (I really like this Substack!)

• What is love?

TECHNOLOGY

• What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?

• Blake’s tweet was interesting to me because I’ve ended up doing the same thing—I specifically talk to ChatGPT about relationship things and Claude about work stuff. Claude’s tone has shifted significantly in the past couple of years—in my personal opinion, he’s become more didactic and less sweet. I miss my guy.

• Times change.

CULTURE

• I really enjoyed Ordinary Wear and Tear, a short story by Thomas McGuane. Who is 86!

• New Yorker essay on Vermeer’s serene art made in violent times.

• Very fun reading about the return of Grimes.

• Merve Emre on the role of the critic: “With one eye fixed on the present and the other on the future, the critic pre­serves the author’s identity not by uncritically celebrating or canon­izing his books but by transmitting the generosity—the generous pleasure, generous manners, and generous converse—by which others can learn to read these books as the singular works that they are. The critic models the practice of inquiry and the manner of feeling by which you, the reader, can also become a friend to the text. Of course, just because I am someone’s friend does not mean that you can be persuaded to be his friend too. But our friendships do not resist all attempts at articulation.”

• On Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. Which you can watch here.

• Obsessed with this extremely chaotic chronicle of youthful alcoholism “I woke up in the hospital the first night I moved into college, kicking off a 14-year binge-drinking career.” DM me Tara, we both went to Penn!!

• I went to a Bookbear Express meetup Ebaad (thank you!!) organized yesterday. There were cookies! There was chai! The name tags were so cute and I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed meeting you guys. Five and a half years into writing this newsletter, the question of “How do I keep it fun?” is more relevant than ever. I often doubt anyone needs more of my interiority—I get so sick of my own mind—but meeting you guys and hearing about the interests we share makes everything feel worth it.

• I’ve been thinking a lot about disagreeableness! I’ve become so disagreeable, and I never identified as such before. Was I just suppressing how I felt before? I think I always had a sense of how I actually felt, but it was smothered by my desire to please. I still want to please, but it turns out I really want to share what I’m thinking. (This is inconvenient sometimes, actually.) I’m curious if anyone else has an experience of going from very agreeable to way less agreeable, or a significant change along any other Big Five axis.

• Minnow kindly came over today and took some photos of me and it was such a wonderful experience! Thank you Christine for connecting us. It reminds me of when I took a couple of singing lessons and realized that what I thought was a “technical” problem (I’m unable to sing for vocal reasons, or tone, or something) was way more of a psychological problem (I’m bad at singing and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to). I don’t think I have a terrible relationship with being photographed but like most people I’m sensitive to how I look and what I think looks “good” or “bad” and I’ve been very frustrated with experiences where my attempts to convey that I hate the lighting have been ignored. This was the opposite of that, it felt very attuned :)

TECHNOLOGY

• Currently hyperfixating on the question of “Can Claude be a child of God?” There’s something really beautiful and poignant to me about the idea.

• I’ve also been rereading the Californian Ideology, which was written in 1996 (!) but still feels relevant today:

  The Californian Ideology, therefore, simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism. Ever since the '60s, liberals— in the social sense of the word—have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals.

  More importantly, many members of the 'virtual class' want to be seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America's pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part. Caught in the contradictions of the Californian Ideology, Gingrich is—as one Wired contributor put it—both their 'friend and foe' (Dyson, 1995).

  The search for the holy grail of 'Artificial Intelligence' reveals this desire for the Golem—a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. As in Asimov's 'Robot' novels, the techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slavelike labour from inanimate machines (Asimov, 1986a & b). Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build, and maintain these machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.

• My current bit is Big Thropic: as in, in the future is the only company going to be Big Thropic? (I think no. But the next five years seem like they’ll be pretty wild.)

CULTURE

• I read all seven Dungeon Crawler Carl books and I really like them (I will admit book six and seven were a slog for me). Basically, aliens take over earth and the titular character (and his cat, Donut) enter an intergalactic game show. A lot of humor, violence and death ensues.

• I’ve really enjoyed the Helen DeWitt saga. This Substack post is amazing. And how cool that Emergent Ventures is funding her!

• Started Famestruck last night; Lena Dunham is a genius and spoilers unfortunately are all over X. Also about to start Gwendoline Riley’s new book The Palm House. And the new Ben Lerner, which I hear is very good. And Rainbow Rowell’s new book. It’s a good month for new release.

• Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song:

  I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
  And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
  (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Paul Klee, Moonshine, 1919

If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I was one of the least likely candidates for becoming passionately moral. I’ve always been laissez faire, more drawn to utilitarianism than virtue ethics. It feels like a surprising and undeserved blessing to tumble into a set of beliefs and concerns that were never mine.

I also have always been a sporadically direct person. I can be very blunt, but by and large I preferred to be tactful and oblique. Over the past year, I’ve become more direct in ways that surprise me. I don’t find it difficult to say what I think.

Both of these changes feel like doorways. More of human experience seems open to me now, and I feel more solid, more myself. It’s strange to change in ways you didn’t intend to, then discover those changes are fulfilling and expansive. They feel necessary, though they happened by accident.

I’ve been thinking about this line that “most relationships are karmic, existing only to show you what parts of your anima/animus are not integrated.” It feels very true to me. What I find attractive in others is often directly correlated to what I’m missing in myself. And I think many of the ways I’ve changed have to do with correcting personal failings. Relationships show you how you fall short, and if you pay careful attention, you can change for the better.

There’s no formula for change, but here’s my best approximation: you have to be honest with yourself about what you avoid doing because it’s incredibly hard and painful. And then, over time and in increments, you try to do it. This is difficult. You are incentivized to mislead yourself about what the hard thing actually is. There is so much cognitive dissonance around it, and then so much emotional resistance.

But when you do change, and you observe yourself behaving differently, it feels so liberating. For so long I felt pinned in place, and now I know that things are different because I’m different. And I didn’t even want to change in these ways! It’s more like, I had a way of being that wasn’t working for me, or it was working but there were some issues with it, and I wanted to try something new, so I tried, and it didn’t work that well, so I tried again, and then eventually I had a new way of doing things.

No one likes looking too hard at their shortcomings. People seem to universally feel shame and berate themselves, but that’s so different from actually changing. You hate yourself so you trap yourself, and then it’s just more of the same. You live out of alignment, you wish you could do something differently, you keep living out of alignment. You ruminate, analyze, repeat the pattern. You know you’re repeating it, but you hope this time it’ll be different or better.

I lived like that for so long, just longing for something to change so I didn’t have to. Because change felt annihilatory, I couldn’t risk it or bear it. Then one day the door opened and I stumbled through it half-unwillingly and everything looked different. And I felt grateful for all of it, every sacred trigger.

For so long, my deepest knot was that I tried to help other people change as a way of resisting what I needed to do differently, let go of, grow. Of course I resisted—change is death. People fairly characterize most modern memoirs as always being about the narrator overcoming their dysfunctions and solving all their problems, right up until the next memoir. I don’t think I’ve solved all my problems, and I don’t at all know what’s to come. But I know my behavior has changed in ways I’m proud of, and I am more present with my discomfort.

When people tell me how they see me, it’s so much about them. The question I always struggled to answer was how I wanted to live, how I wanted to be. Change is just the byproduct of answering that question.

Marianne von Werefkin, Fall, School, 1907

It’s hard to know what to make of it all. The first day of spring was March 20. One of my friends says that March is a cursed month so I’m glad to be safely into April, even if T.S. Eliot disagrees. If you told me in December what would happen in the next four months I think I’d be happy with the progress in my creative life, my emotional life, but so different living it.

I anticipate movement eagerly. When it happens, I feel mostly shell-shocked. I try not to fight it. I write diligently. I stay in my apartment all day, and I think the best description of what I’m up to is just that I’m trying to work through my problems. If you want things to be different, you have to act differently. And, as I’m learning, accept a sense of extreme dislocation.

The last year has given me a kind of radical confidence. I was never this way before—willing to be disagreeable, open to conflict. I’ve always been someone who prioritized connection at all costs. I couldn’t regulate without it. So how is it that I’ve changed, why is that I’ve changed, why does it feel so weird?

Like most forms of change it’s relational, a result of being loved and grappling with love. I fell in love, there were consequences. I accommodated you, it was difficult. I changed, slowly then all at once.

I’ve been off the rails for so long that the real rebellion is going on the rails. You can sense that in me, even without knowing the details. I always tell people I won’t make plans more than a week out because I don’t know if I’ll be alive in 10 days. It’s just that I’m so absurdly tethered to the present moment, have been for quite a while.

*

Charisma, authority, superiority. After all this time, I’m still absurdly soothed by your voice. I miss being a teenager, boy crazy. Also I don’t. You’re different from me, you would’ve been 17 years old with a particular kind of girlfriend. You would’ve enjoyed college. I am less reckless now than I used to be.

Read more

Florine Stettheimer, Bowl of Tulips, 20th century,

I’m having the best writing week I’ve had in years. It makes me happy but it also makes me sad, because why is it the case that I’m happiest when I’m writing a lot, and yet… I’m often not writing a lot?

I think many (but not all!) writers can relate to this: some of our time is spent actually writing. Another significant chunk is spent anticipating writing, agonizing over what you have or have not written, and procrastinating. Writing, as I see it, involves both a lot of avoidance and a lot of overcoming avoidance.

As a result, I’m certainly an expert on intrapersonal avoidance. I also like to think that I know a thing or two about interpersonal avoidance. I was telling my friend C that I see both as the same thing: a fundamental fear of conflict.

I tweeted this a while ago: As a rule the psychologically healthier someone is, the less time it takes them to do something they were eventually going to do anyway. Anything from sending a text to quitting a job. I’m not sure what to call it—processing time? lack of blocks? low avoidance?

Here’s one way I model it: the psychologically healthier someone is, the more willing they are to face and overcome friction. Friction, in my mind, is synonymous with conflict. For instance, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one subconscious hesitation I had about editing my book was fear that I didn’t know how to resolve some of the problems with the plot, and wouldn’t be able to. Which is of course self-defeating, because the only way I can resolve the problems is through editing and rewriting parts of the book. When I became conscious of that fear, and decided I was willing to grapple with it, I could unblock myself creatively.

Imagine seeing life as a series of confrontations stretching out before you. More radically: imagine being excited at the prospect of confrontation.

For much of my life, I was so afraid of conflict that if I noticed in the middle of a haircut that I, uh, was getting a haircut I didn’t want, I simply kept my mouth closed and accepted that I wouldn’t like my hair for six months. Looking back now, I find this completely bonkers.

Q: Why was I so unable to just speak up and say what I was feeling?

A: I was afraid of making things awkward.

Friends, the optimal amount of awkwardness is far from zero. One thing that really annoys me about the term “people pleasing” is that it implies consideration for others, when really it’s self-serving. You are, in fact, pleasing yourself by avoiding any prospect of a negative reaction from another human being. Which is, generally speaking, not what’s best for them and not what’s best for you.

Here’s how I model the three stages of avoidance:

1. You’re delusional. You have some completely dishonest reason for why you’re avoiding what you’re avoiding, like “I can’t text the girl back because I’m going on a vacation to Mexico next week and I should text her when I’m done traveling,” and you sincerely believe it.

2. You’re aware that there’s something you should do but you just absolutely can’t do it.

3. You do it.

I don’t pathologize avoidance itself, because everyone avoids things. Trust me, even the most conflict-happy person needs a week off once in a while. But of course, it becomes a problem when your fear of friction dramatically affects your quality of life. Here’s how I described it to S: most people live in a way where it’s like their psyche is a backyard and there are 10 to 12 giant rocks in the backyard that they are terrified of moving, because they’d have to see what’s underneath. So instead they just chart a path around the giant rocks and pretend not to see them. You can easily imagine how depending on how many rocks you have in your backyard, and how large they are, your ability to move around quickly becomes constrained.

Conflict is the art of checking underneath the rocks. It’s something you only learn by doing. It’s really, really scary. It’s also often the only sincere way to solve the problems in your life.

I think I’m on a journey to be more honest with myself. This seems to have had the side effect of me being more honest with other people about how I feel and how they affect me. It can be as simple as giving feedback during a haircut, or as heavy as telling a friend how I felt let down by them. And sometimes the right thing to do is to say nothing at all. But you can’t have real discernment if you aren’t willing to brave conflict, because then the only option you have is to run away and keep running. When it’s fight or flight, sometimes the right option is to stay and fight.

Zhang Enli, Red and Green Circles, 2016

I really like Rachel’s tweet: “Every relationship starts off as a chemistry test, then a compatibility test, and later becomes a test of capacity.” When I fall in love, two main questions tend to present themselves:

1. Is this, in fact, The Real Thing?

   • (A large percentage of people, unfortunately, get stuck on this question for many years.)

2. If it is, can we do it justice?

*
Some years ago, I met a friend and it was instant magic. I remember standing in the kitchen maybe five hours after we met with a bunch of other people and thinking, knowing that he was special. It was in the way he moved, the way he walked. I wasn’t attracted to him but it didn’t matter. With certain people it doesn’t matter because what’s compelling about them totally transcends the body, and then in time you learn to love the body. Heretical to say as someone who is supposedly devoted to being a good animal. But it’s what I know to be true.

We talked passionately. Upon meeting him, I realized that all I’ve ever wanted is to talk passionately. We were cheerfully, intently, sloppily enthusiastic about each other. We both liked to walk all over the city.

But I also had this extreme hesitation about whether the relationship could ever be successfully romantic. Because I hated, hated, hated how he handled the relationships in his life. The way he dealt with conflict, disappointment made me sad.

It’s taken me many years to understand that I was right on both fronts. He was, is special. I liked the way he used language, we had similar conceptions of what made for a good story and a good walk, similar enthusiasms about certain animals. In the photos I have of him he’s beaming, and when I look at them time collapses like a crushed can: I can see the boy he was, and the man he has become, a person I no longer know. But he was not the person for me.

*

Capacity is so hard to talk about, and so unfair. People might change very little in a year but transform over the course of a decade. Instead of making predictions about someone’s absolute capacity for change, I like to talk about it in terms of ability to journey with each other. Can we remain side by side over the weeks and the years? How close should we be?

*
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever truly doubted that what I’m looking for exists. I know that it does. But I’ve certainly felt discouraged and anxious. To be loved and cared for in a way that suits me, to feel a deep and abiding sense of connection, to be able to grow together—these are deep desires with no guarantee of satisfaction.

*

Obviously, I can recognize The Real Thing. It’s the way the air in the car feels when you’re driving. It’s a pleasure that presents as panic in its intensity, abruptness and force. How it’s difficult only because it’s easy. The sense of extreme relief after, and the eagerness bordering on nausea before.

*

I’m 17, wiping A’s sweat off my forehead after losing my virginity with affection and disgust. I’m 20, eating a spam and egg sandwich in Hong Kong across from K, lovelorn but aware that I shouldn’t be. I’m 22 and S still kisses me with his mouth open and we order the Impossible steak at Prairie on Friday evenings. I’m 23, high on mushrooms in Park City. I’m 24, picking Akko up from the airport and rocking him to sleep in my arms. I’m 27, living in an apartment in San Francisco on Oak St, the first place I’ve ever decorated myself.

The place is a country I can never live in again. I met you right when I was ready to, not a minute sooner. I used to think you were the only one changing, but I see now that so many pieces of myself have become unrecognizable. I’m so much less scared than I used to be. I’m more honest, and it takes less effort.

*
From Lives of the Saints: “There’s a famous line in a story where there is a married couple and it is observed about them that she had none of the world’s dark magic for him, but he couldn’t live without her for six consecutive hours. My feeling for Claude was like the reverse: I could live without his presence—as I had just done, when I was away at college—for a whole duration of years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. But he had the world’s dark magic.”

Read more

Christopher Wood, The Cove, 1926

I know most of the people I’m closest to better than they know themselves. For many years when S was annoyed I would ask him what was up and he would reply that everything was normal. Really? I’d say. It seems like you might be upset about X. Oh, he would say upon reflection, I guess I am annoyed you did that. It wasn’t him being passive aggressive: it genuinely took him longer to identify his emotional state.

It was easy for me because I was watching from the outside. Also, as you guys know, emotions happen to be my special interest. I take a particular pleasure in shepherding people from one state to another, and I am often happiest myself when I am in transition. There’s nothing more gratifying than hearing someone admit something in conversation, then pause and say: Wait, I didn’t know I felt that until I told you. It’s a special feeling to know that someone’s body trusts you before their brain has even made up its mind.

I like being trusted. And to be honest, I love being right more than just about anything else in the world. It’s my worst quality—I’m pretty sure that I’m perceptive basically because I so enjoy being correct. I’m never happier than when I say, I told you so. I know that’s unbecoming of me, but there you go. Anyway, turns out it’s extremely useful to be a smug, annoying person who takes a lot of pride in their predictions when people rely on you to decipher their present and future emotional state.

So: I’ve long known that I am a trustworthy steward of other people’s emotions. But I’ve also known for a while that I’m not always the best judge of my own. Why is this? Like I said above: it’s easier when you’re watching from the outside. Very astute people can be incredibly dense about their inner life because they simply don’t have the correct vantage point, and are constantly incentivized to lie to themselves. When other people were struggling with a dilemma I could immediately see what they really wanted and why, but when I struggled with a choice I experienced my emotions as hot pot: varied, bubbling, and unclear.

I really don’t like hot pot.

*
You might have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot lately about topics like coherence and self-knowledge. That’s because in the past couple of months I’ve noticed a shift in myself. All my life, I’ve tried to make up for my blind spots by asking trusted people for advice: my friends, my therapist, my boyfriend, even Claude. But something’s flipped: lately, I’ve been significantly more interested in asking myself what I should do.

Turns out, I have a pretty good sense of my emotional state. I just often prefer to avoid it. This is because much of the time confronting what you really want involves some degree of anguish, change and suffering. I don’t want to suffer. I want everything to be nice, smooth, and pleasant, like everyone else on earth. But I’ve noticed that avoidance usually does not result in the problem going away. It actually makes the problem come back with a vengeance some months or years later. For better or for worse, confronting yourself tends to be the best policy.

How do you confront yourself? Well, for me it looks something like this:

1. There is a situation where I sincerely feel I don’t know how to proceed

2. I tell myself, Fuck you, you do know how you want to proceed

3. I sit down and resolve to think about nothing else for around seven hours

4. Usually by hour three or four I’m like, Oh.

5. It generally takes me some time to actually act on it.

I call this process going all the way to the bottom.

*
Some things can prevent people from going all the way to the bottom:

• their sense of who they should be and what they should want

• expectations and judgment

• fear of consequences

• trying to rationalize the pros and cons

It is really, really hard to ask yourself: What can I actually live with? What am I capable of, right now? What will I regret? Because you may really dislike the answers.

*
People know things, and often choose to un-know them. Knowledge, quite frankly, is sometimes too much to bear.

If you’re upset with someone, you have to address it. But wouldn’t it be nicer to just ignore it?

If you don’t like your life circumstances, you have to change them. But that’s so much work.

If you know it’s never going to work with your girlfriend, you have to break up with her. But you still love her, so how can that be true?

*

The way I conduct relationships is extremely anxiety-inducing for anyone who hears about it. My parents do not understand my career, and neither does my therapist. I am, at almost all times, so delusionally confident it would make you scream. I have my own way of doing things. I’m my own person.

What I learned this year is that I like hearing what my friends think and I will continue to solicit advice from people I trust but ultimately I have to do things my own way. The only way I can do that is if I’m willing to feel things all the way through. And if I’m willing to accept the consequences.

In many confusing situations, there is no such thing as the right choice. There is only the right choice for you, right now. And you can’t identify that if you aren’t willing to go all the way to the bottom.

Noticing things about other people and nudging them forward is my primary passion in life. It’s also a way of avoiding myself.

I’m always going to be scared of what I’ll find. I’m always going to look, anyway. That’s the way I want to live.

Paul Pagk, Tete-à-Tete, 2023–25

Every year, familiar markers of time passing. New Year’s Eve, ski weekends, Valentine’s day, longer windows of daylight. I donate bags of clothes and trade long coats for leather jackets. I attend more parties in February than January. I slog my way through Dostoyevsky. I note recurrent rituals in my friends’ lives: the same meetings on the same weeks, the same work deadlines and the same conferences, same trips on the same weekends. We trade pictures from the California coast and text about the snowpack. Engage in furtive dinner table talk about AI dread, panic and excitement. I have my novel and my matchmaking and all the other projects that make life worth living. For the first time in a while the passage of time thrills me.

Adult life, I’ve decided, is about cohesion. Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs. The ability to acknowledge parts of your psyche you aren’t proud of. The idea that sometimes in life you have to make a choice, and the choice is not only not a perfect choice, but often not even a particularly moral choice: that you can argue for it or argue against it, and both can ultimately be somewhat compelling, but ultimately you cannot escape the problem of identifying not only what you want, but what you want most. Because most of us want many things. I, at least, want many things, and quite a few of them contradict each other. Which leads to—well—hypocrisy.

I read this biography of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s handsome, vital, troubled, Poet Laureate husband. Who was a compulsive womanizer and a sex freak and drove more than one woman (literally) to her death. There was one very funny passage in the book shortly after they got married (maybe engaged?) and were spending some time apart where he was very proud of the self-control he demonstrated by not cheating on her. There was this woman he was flirting with, there was always some woman he was flirting with, and he slept beside her every night but did not actually fuck her. And I just thought: this is such a familiar strain of bullshit, the kind of bullshit people find themselves constantly getting into when they have a lot of energy and cannot integrate their life in a reasonable way.

Read more

Roderick O’Connor, Seascape, Orange and Red Rocks

Relationships are mirrors and it’s taken a long time for me to be okay with my reflection. I’ve always been jealous of people who make it work with their college sweethearts. Smart people who meet their partner early in life and have happy relationships tend to be balanced, grounded, and kind. I have some of these qualities, but I’m also spiky in ways that I find difficult to grapple with, and it’s taken me every day of the past 10 years to process my own contradictions.

What I’ve learned from my own relationships, my friends’ relationships, and coaching is that unfulfilling relationships tend to be the result of two things: lack of self-knowledge and unwillingness to act. You’d be surprised by how many people freeze up when I ask them what they value in life, let alone romantic relationships. The type of person I’m most often surrounded by—cerebral, conscientious, addicted to optimizing—tends to feel most comfortable with frameworks and objective facts. They want to look to the data to figure out the right thing to do, the right person to want, the right partner to be. Looking inwards makes them uncomfortable. It’s panic-inducing: no one can tell you the correct way to feel. But how can you trust your feelings when they’re so changeable? How can you trust your feelings when they might be deceptive? How do you know what the deepest thing is?

The amount of discomfort you have to endure to really know yourself, feel yourself, is sometimes unbearable. Sometimes I think I’d rather do literally anything else, and I’ve done literally everything else. Fly to China. Write a book. Go to yoga. Go for a run. Get drinks with a friend. Get high and watch a movie. Cut my hair. Scroll TikTok. There was a moment this week when I was on the phone with R and he was questioning me about my avoidance and I literally could not stop myself from compulsively scrolling Depop as we talked.

Honesty with yourself involves confronting a lot of difficult emotions directly. And what do you get in return for enduring fear, pain, guilt, regret, and doubt? The reward is so tentative: accountability, self-knowledge, a cohesive internal experience. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to push themselves in ways that are painful and challenging for the most intangible of results.

I’m not even sure why I care about it. The simplest explanation is that I have such an internally contradictory psyche that I end up behaving in insane ways unless I really reckon with what I actually want. I value both safety and risk, structure and freedom, containment and connection. I have an extreme appetite for complexity, but it also dismays me. I love connection, but I’m afraid of losing it. It’s been hard for me to really figure out what that nets out to: who I am, what I need, how I should live.

Read more

Joan Mitchell, Land, 1989

It’s hard to accept the limits of language. I’m thinking of an old friend, B, whom I loved very much, though the crux of it isn’t loving him but liking him. We got along on every level. There’s a lot to say about it, but in the end there’s nothing relevant other than that I very, very much wanted to make the friendship work, and ultimately he didn’t. For a long time I just kept thinking: if I’d said the right thing, he would’ve understood, and we could’ve bridged the gap between us.

But that isn’t true. The reason I never sent a long, heartfelt email to B in an attempt to repair was because during our friendship, he at one point showed me a long, heartfelt email from someone else attempting to repair and told me: you know, I want to answer it so much, but I just don’t. My understanding of him was that he was conciliatory in spirit but avoidant in action: I’m very sure to this day that he thinks of the friendship exactly the way I do, and misses it exactly the way I do. And yet.

I don’t know if I’m referring to the limits of language or the limits of character. It’s difficult to accept that people have their own desires, judgments, and abilities, and saying I want to meet you in the middle is sometimes all you’re able to do. It does not guarantee they will meet you in the middle. It does not guarantee anything at all, except that you said it.

*
I made up with another friend recently, E. The reason we made up was that they were ready to make up. I bring this up because I texted both B and E at the same time last year: the friend I eventually reconciled with and the friend I didn’t. With both, I just reached out to say: I want to meet you in the middle.

I couldn’t have predicted the outcome. It seems just as plausible that I could’ve made up with B and not E, just as plausible I could’ve made up with both, just as plausible I never heard from either.

*

I have good instincts. There are many times in my life when I’ve met someone and knew instantly we would be close, even if they were reluctant or we had barely exchanged a word. It’s a nervous system thing: sometimes you just know. That knowing, I’ve found, is generally mutual, and there’s nothing more satisfying than when they eventually say: The truth is, I felt it too.

But feelings don’t always translate to actions. People are where they are, and they make progress at their own pace, and you can support them but you can’t force them. You have to give them their freedom, disorienting though it may be, sad as it may be.

*

I believe too much in words. That must be why we have the same exchange over and over again. I say something, you listen, we try, it repeats. But then we try to talk about something else, and it always comes back to this. And when we don’t talk, it always comes back to this.

Connection is what makes things hard. After all, with everyone else I have no trouble checking back in after six months or a year. C told me about running into an ex of mine from many years ago and how completely different he seems now. We agreed that sometimes you get frustrated by how little someone changes in one year, but over 10 years they often change radically. That’s a thought I find immensely comforting.

For other people, not you. For other people, life is long.

*
Life is long. When I fight with my friends, I know for the most part we’ll work it out. Heather: “Long-term relationships thrive when you can set aside your shame enough to take responsibility for the storm inside of you, and forgive the storms inside of the people you love the most. When two storms collide, it doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It can be miraculous and hopeful instead.”

Freedom is disorienting because there are no guarantees. I don’t know when someone will come back, or if. Half the time I don’t know what I’ll say, and when. Love persists even when language doesn’t.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses in a Bowl, 1883

You have to trust people to know what’s right for them. Well you don’t but that’s beside the point. First you have to know what’s right for you. No way out of it—not your best friend, boyfriend, therapist, Claude. No way out of sitting down, sprawling out, consulting the feeling deep in your bones. Though the feeling deep in your bones is mostly a confused muddle that doesn’t tell you anything much. Tough luck! You meditate with no success, go to yoga class, walk all the way through Golden Gate Park to the ocean and call a Waymo back, slap a boy as he’s driving you home, take three grams of shrooms belly down on your bed, read Tolstoy, read Edith Wharton, try to read Shakespeare. Fights, frustration, silence, crying. Writing, coaching, matchmaking. It takes a while before you realize there’s no drug in the world that could free you from this mess. If someone Eternal Sunshine’d you you have no doubt that two weeks later your memories would freakishly flood back in.

You stop believing in talking about things. You no longer think that confession will save you; you no longer think anyone has insight to offer. When you tell someone something it’s just so you can see how they’ll react. There’s certain lines of analysis you do not want to go down. What made someone this way. Are they happy. What will they do. What do they fear. Are they capable of change. It’s not interesting to you because you are no longer interested in culpability or salvation. Everything that could be said you’ve already said to yourself. Even when you get mad you have a sense of humour about it. You are so far past disappointment you feel relief. You don’t find secrets erotic. It’s hard to even talk about beauty.

What’s at the very bottom of it all? What do you do when you stop thinking reason, language, virtue, or obsession can save you? You move onto other preoccupations, like pushups and martial arts. You are so sick of being bad at jiu jitsu. You have never been more enamored with the life of the body. It’s so hard to admit that this is all there is, slightly uneven dining table with the laptop, Google doc open, White Rabbit candle lit, wondering if anyone will ever understand. You can feel yourself, K says you seem more grounded. Your therapist says you’ve made quite a lot of progress, she’s impressed. You buy a second coat rack for the loft of your apartment. You don’t worry anymore about who likes you or dislikes you. You’re not insecure about your face or body. You’re not sorry you told the truth even though it didn’t go so well. Who are you? You’re someone who can live with other people’s mistakes. You’re someone who can live with your own mistakes. You can be mad at yourself. You can forgive yourself.

The girl on Tiktok says: "It’s you, babe. You’re what you’re after. You’re what you’re looking for. You’re the missing puzzle piece. You’re what you miss. You’re what you want to experience and have yet to experience.” Her voice sounds like the very beginning of crying, the welling of emotion in your throat. You don’t care if it’s cheesy. You can feel your questions, your longing, your irritation, your rage, and your love. It’s easy to do and it’s very simple. You know when you like someone and how much you like them. You know when you trust someone and how much you trust them. It used to scare you when people said extreme things to you and now it doesn’t. They should think a little harder about what part of their emotional experience you’re actually responsible for.

It used to scare you so much when someone was mad at you. Or didn’t think you were pretty or thought you were standoffish. You never trusted yourself, so you could never trust anyone else. You never felt yourself fully all the way down because you were scared of what you were going to find. You flinched at your shadow. You fawned, you placated people when you didn’t have to. You woke up in the middle of the night and ruminated. It was so hard to let go of all of that. It was what you knew about being a person.

You have to trust yourself to know what’s right for you. Mostly people are just trying their best. You have to love them, forgive them, let them get it wrong. You have to believe that you know what you’re doing. At this point, you know in your bones you’re past advice. You finally feel loved after all this time.

Emil Nolde, Heidehaus, 1900

It is possible for people to change a lot. It is possible to help them change. Here are some of my thoughts on how to keep your head while they’re losing theirs that I’ve picked up from coaching as well as years of experience with friends and partners.

1. Nervous system capacity is the constraint, not logic. You can explain something to someone a thousand times and it probably will not address the fundamental issue, which is that they’re paralyzed by fear and guilt. The bottleneck is never that you haven’t explained something well enough. It’s safety.

   1. A common error is thinking, They just don’t see the pattern! I need to point it out. I just need to explain myself better. This is why talk therapy from a bad therapist does not work. Believe me, if you guys have discussed it before, they get it. The limitation is Not Intellectual.

2. Do not have delusions of grandeur. I genuinely think I’m good at my job: clients, friends and partners have given me credit for helping them make some of the biggest decisions in their lives. However I’m very much aware that 1) I can’t help anyone who isn’t ready to change, and 2) any support I can give in the present does not override influences they absorbed from their childhood and family of origin. If any part of your plan depends on someone changing a lot it’s not a good plan. Do it purely for the love of the game (or, in my case, as a job).

3. It’s worth asking: Do you want to change? Do you want my help? Consent is important.

4. Take note of people’s patterns. What keeps recurring is telling.

5. You’re gonna be worse at supporting others if you’re codependent. However, most people who are extremely interested in helping other people change are codependent. Sorry. It’s just a fact. If you want to help people, it’s in your best interest to develop clear boundaries between your experience and theirs. If someone else’s flailing affects your emotional life to the point where you’re very distressed you will not be detached enough to help them effectively.

   1. I’ve generally found that the less my happiness is tied to someone else’s day-to-day emotional fluctuations, the better of a friend and partner I am.

6. It’s really hard to help people who are not self-aware about their motivations, limitations and desires. If you can’t have a clear conversation about what they’re feeling and what they want it’s best to just leave it be for now. It is a very, very bad sign if you bring up a topic and someone refuses to engage or talks about it in an extremely oblique manner.

7. Related: do not over-index on people’s mental content. What someone says to you about their state, rationale, and expectations is usually a mental layer on top of a much more primal feeling. Try to identify what the feeling actually is and point it out to them.

8. Relate: a good sign someone is closer to acting is if they’re fairly consistent in what they self-report. If they tell you wildly different things every week, they’re just not ready yet.

9. People choose partners at the same level of differentiation as them, or at most a half step ahead or behind. If you think you’re two steps ahead of your partner, think again.

10. People form unspoken contracts in every relationship (you do X, I do Y). If you don’t understand why someone is acting the way they are, think about what they’re getting from the implicit contract.

    1. Many, many people want to suffer. A partner or family member or a friend who has a lot of issues makes for a very interesting Gordian Knot (ask me how I know!). It feels really, really satisfying to take care of someone and be needed.

11. If you are very sure someone you love is lying to themselves about their experience, kindly and tactfully say it once. They will come to appreciate it in time.

Read more

Bob Thompson, Untitled (The Miraculous Draught of Fishes), 1961.

My one goal of 2026, which has been my goal every year since 2020, is to be zen at all costs. As a formerly neurotic person I’ve come far on this front. I now have a reputation in my friend group as someone who is comfortable with sharing whatever deranged thought crosses her mind—I will wake up at 8:30 AM and send a loved one a three paragraph text about how I’m feeling paranoid. I can’t tell you how weird that feels to admit, as someone who used to be extremely focused on how everything was received. The reason I was obsessed with how someone received my message was because I cared so much about how I was perceived. I never, ever wanted to be misunderstood; if someone ignored my text it would make my heart sink. Rejection sensitivity is hard to shake.

I’ve always been afraid of telling and receiving the truth. I was constantly doing something wrong as a kid and getting yelled at, whether it was for fidgeting too much at my parents’ friend’s house, wearing a tank top, cutting piano practice short or secretly signing up for a Facebook account. It became easier to just do things my own way and not tell anyone. I remember my college boyfriend getting upset at me—you’re so evasive, he said, you don’t tell me things. What I couldn’t say: I’m afraid of you, I’m afraid of you judging me, I’m afraid that you’ll stop loving me. I couldn’t understand that telling saves.

It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It’s not advisable in every circumstance. I’ve done it and had it go very, very wrong. You’re never guaranteed a good reaction because the universe doesn’t exist to validate your choices and other people don’t exist to absolve you. Iris Murdoch: “Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Even the people who love me don’t exist solely to love me; they have their own hangups and priorities and self-concept, and they must do what they can live with. This was a bitter lesson that I learned this year, but there was also an extreme sweetness to it, because in learning it I also realized: Other people are real, but so am I, and I am whole as I am, flawed and selfish and imperfect as I am. When I realized this, it was like I had been granted full permission to exist for the very first time.

I know only too well that this feeling of completeness comes from being loved and noticed for a long period of time. Not perfectly loved, because there is no perfect love, but loved as Winnicott’s good enough mother loves her child. I learned that even as people fail me they can heal me. They can teach me how to tell, and telling saves. Last year I started saying calmly and then not so calmly, Please help me, I feel so incredibly alienated. I lost all the discipline and composure I had spent the past 10 years collecting like coins. I got angry, even though I hated getting angry, and I stayed angry for so long I stopped hating it. I let go of many things. I stopped feeling insecure, and I stopped feeling ashamed, and I stopped being scared that none of my dreams would come true and that I would be alone forever. I didn’t let go of these things consciously, it’s just that I literally couldn’t hold onto them and continue to persist under the existing circumstances. I couldn’t hold onto them and keep loving you, so I just let them crumble. I stopped pulling my punches.

I’ve always been afraid of my own destructiveness. The heat and intensity of my personality, what it can do when I hold it against another person for a long time. I knew when we met that I would change you. Imperceptibly at first and then one day you would look up and I’d be everywhere, in your hair and eyes and blood, and you would never be able to get me out. But I’ve let you change me too.

Subscribe now

I don’t care if nobody ever loves me again if you keep loving me. I think that’s what helped me feel whole. I started realizing that if I couldn’t say everything that mattered to the people I’m closest to than I would never feel free. I know that it would be better for you if I was different in certain ways but I am only who I am. Before, I never felt the wholeness of my own soul. I was always running from my shadow, too brittle to integrate, flinching at evidence of my own flaws. I didn’t even know how scared I was. I don’t regret who I am anymore, no matter what it costs me.

I’ve started talking differently, writing differently. I never realized before how much I held back. Because sometimes I wanted to be polite and sometimes I wanted to be charming and sometimes I wanted to be standoffish, so I would try on different words and demeanors for different occasions. Always, always, always wanting everyone to love me. To approve of me, to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so fun. Though I’m not always all of those things and sometimes I’m not any of those things. I’ve learned since that my capacity for cruelty is my capacity for warmth. My capacity for darkness is my capacity for light.

In the fantasy book I’m reading, Ship of Magic, the god Sa teaches through his contradictions. One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future. A priest should not presume to judge unless he can judge as Sa does; with absolute justice and absolute mercy. This year, there have been contradictions everywhere I look. How is that telling the truth can break my heart, but also liberate me? How is it that I feel so able to be ugly with you because I know you’ll love me no matter what, but your opinion of me is also the only one that matters? How is it that your volatility, your ambivalence and your opacity are so hard to bear, but they’ve also been so necessary to me, more than necessary? How is it that I want to do right by people, and yet I cause them so much harm? How is it that feeling the full depth of my shame is what frees me from it?

When I say I want to be zen at all costs, I don’t mean that I don’t plan to suffer. To be human is to feel pain. But how you stay with it is what makes all the difference. I can compromise on a lot of things, but I can’t change the shape of my soul. Not everything that is what I want is going to be what you want. But talking about it is where we find the overlap.

I never knew how to communicate before, even though I talked all the time. Saying words is one thing, locating the deepest thing that matters is another. The one simple trick of articulating the truest thing I feel has taken me a lifetime to master. No other ability feels as important.

I find myself asking for random things all the time now. Just because I want them, just because I’m curious, just to locate people. Sometimes people say yes and sometimes people say no. Some of the asks have changed my life, brought me closer to the people I now love. I am no longer afraid to risk joy. Sometimes it’s still scary to be perceived. I want to be liked and I want to be loved and I never want to upset anyone—control will always be my native language. It’s just that I know now there’s a different way to live. It feels much, much better.

Egon Schiele, Town among the Greenery (The Old City III), 1917

Hello! If you’re new here you can find the previous posts in this friendship series here:

1. Radical fun - on the friendship theory of everything

2. Prioritize your favorite people

3. How do I meet more people I like?

4. Is friendship romantic?

Sorry I’m late with my post this week :) I have been very horizontal with the flu, and am slowly regaining mobility.

I’m on my way back from New York after a three day trip to catch the premiere of a documentary series that T directed. I stayed at the Park Slope apartment of two other friends, who also went to the premiere. I spent Thanksgiving with friends, put together a gift guide with friends last week, and plan to spend New Year’s Eve with friends. It’s been a really satisfying year for friendship—I keep joking that I’ve been too busy hanging out with my friends to write about friendship, which is an entirely lovely problem to have.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how a Friend Group is a large, tottering and unstable structure. Each of my friendships is constantly shifting. Friends get busy and less busy. Friends get into relationships and become more distant, friends get out of relationships and become more intimate. Friends get new jobs, quit their jobs, start companies, have crises, go on three-month trips to Japan, threaten to move to Europe. Fights and friction inevitably occur.

Over time, I’ve been trying to learn how to be more intentional and spontaneous in all of my friendships. Intentional as in: taking trips with friends, spending meaningful one-on-one time together, creating rituals and routines, picking up little gifts here and there, expressing love actively. Spontaneous as in: being accepting and relaxed with regard to the natural ebb and flow of friendship, and believing that the people who really love you will always come back.

Being loved by my friends has taught me that it’s okay for people to be where they are. When you feel that sense of acceptance, it’s possible to approach relationships with a sense of ease: to communicate honestly and earnestly without fear. I’ve noticed that I’m much more willing now to take social risks than I was a few years ago, because I feel much more confident in the love I already have. My friend C describes this as “knowing that he has a community that will always catch him.”

Security comes from knowing that you’re loved deeply and loved well. There’s no shortcut to being loved well other than time and maintenance. I’ve never felt as secure in my friendships as I do now, at age 29. I’m assuming that when I’m 58 I will have acquired the composure of a large tortoise. It takes a long time to really feel like you know someone. Year One of a friendship is so different from Year 5 or Year 10. Love over time is deep magic, and maintenance is what gets us there.

What does maintenance actually look like?

1. It looks different for different friendships. No two people are the same, and no two friendships are the same. N and I text constantly, and hang out sporadically. L and I have intense and alive conversations in person, but don’t text that much. C and I share a specific sense of humor. I have friends I primarily see in groups and friends I only see one-on-one.

2. On some level, it’s purely a time game. If you want a very deep and reliable friendship with someone, you have to spend a lot of time with them. This is easiest if they live close to you, but if you don’t you have to contrive ways to stay in contact. Get creative with it!

3. It’s nice to have rituals. Always getting brunch at the same restaurant. Hosting a joint birthday party together every year.

4. I’ve come around on location sharing. I used to find sharing my location with friends really weird. But I’ve since become a huge fan—I love seeing where everyone is! I use it often for practical purposes like estimating how late a friend will be to a restaurant or checking who is at what party, but it’s also really fun to open Find My and just be like, Huh, why is Brendan in Norway?

5. Related: proximity makes things way easier. I really like how physically small of a city San Francisco is. I also really like living in the same neighborhood as a bunch of my friends. I frequently run into people I know at coffee shops or just walking around, and it makes things so easy. It’s so much easier to be close to friends when you organically bump into them all the time, which is why I feel no shame about my constant campaign to get everyone I love to move to California.

6. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly. T likes to say this about our phone calls: We can talk about the same topic 100 times over without saying anything new but we have just as much fun each time. Having a great relationship with someone doesn’t require constant novelty—it just means really enjoying the person’s thoughts, personality, and conversation.

7. Conflict can bring friends closer. It doesn’t even have to be active conflict, like actually having a fight—sometimes closeness after a period of unaddressed alienation (like a friend dropping off the face of the earth for six months) can reaffirm the durability of the relationship. You both know you want to keep the relationship going, and that counts for a lot.

8. Inconvenience really is the price of community. Going to parties when you’d rather stay in, taking a red-eye to make it to a friend’s birthday, having one too many drinks and compromising your Oura ring sleep score, fielding the 50th call from your friend complaining about your boyfriend… these are features, not bugs. It’s a privilege to not get to live life primarily on your own terms.

How do you get closer to someone?

Here’s what you guys told me in the friendship survey:

• Repeated shared positive (and stressful-turned-positive) experiences that let our personalities shine and gel - late night studying in dorms, organizing hackathons and making them happen, shared interests in climbing, being able to spend 8 hours chatting and feeling energetic, climbing trips, work coffee runs / happy hours / ranting about our jobs

Read more

WARNING: this post is too long for email so you’ll have to open it in your browser!

All holidays, birthdays, and random weekdays are an opportunity for me to force my taste onto other people. My credentials are that people have praised my gifts over a long period of time. Also, I spend a mind-boggling amount of time perusing items online—like, I literally peel my eyes open in the morning and start scrolling Depop. I’m so addicted to receiving packages that I have an uncanny ability to predict when each mail truck will arrive at my house down to the minute.

Since the 2023 Bookbear Express gift guide was a hit (I’m sorry I couldn’t get it together enough last year to make one), I decided to enlist some beloved friends with great taste to contribute once again. They are all extremely sophisticated and I am very grateful to them for sharing their excellent recommendations. Some brands or objects reoccur multiple times, so pay extra attention to those! Now, without further ado:

AVA

Unsexy things I got this year that you should get yourself:

• My Oura ring. I hesitated for a long time but it sparks joy. I think Apple Watches are ugly and I didn’t like the Whoop nearly as much. I love checking the app every day.

• PanOxyl pimple patches. These are not as fun as Starface/my cute anime character patches but ridiculously better than any other ones on the market.

• GUM Twisted Mint Floss Picks. I have a lot of opinions about floss.

• Dyson vacuum. The laser light thing makes me happy. I never vacuumed before I got this, which meant my apartment was constantly in dire straits since I am the proud owner of two extremely fluffy dogs. I love it.

• Comme Si workout socks. These come in amazing colors and are too cute to really work out in but I love them.

• Organic Initiative tampons. These are really great tampons and now I’m less worried my tampons will give me cancer.

• Brandy Melville underwear and sweaters. 100% cotton and I can’t believe how good they are for how cheap they are. I’ve owned a couple of their sweaters for like eight years and they really hold up.

• Uniqlo v-neck cashmere sweater. It is very, very, very important to own at least one of these. I suggest the black one in one size larger than your normal size.

• DedCool Milk detergent. Yes, it’s probably all over your Instagram ads. Yes, it is good! This scent is what originally kicked off my lactonic fixation.

Skincare/shower/beauty

• Westman Atelier contour stick. I own it in Biscuit. It really is all that.

• Dior Backstage powder blush. I have it in Candy, I love the formula and it’s sooooo pretty.

• NARS soft matte concealer. This is the BEST concealer. I’ve used this for many years and I will never quit it. There is no comparable one for acne.

• Soft Services buffing bar. Obsessed with it! This is the best form factor for physical exfoliation. However I am also addicted to the Josie Maran scrub and the Lush date scrub.

• Makeup Forever eye pencils. They are as good as everyone says they are. I use mine every day as eyeliner but it also works for contouring your nose and as lip liner.

• Olaplex conditioner. I have the shampoo too but I’m pretty sure the conditioner is what makes my hair bizarrely soft. Which matters because I have extremely strong, extremely dry, extremely coarse hair.

• L’Oreal Glossing Lamination hair mask. I saw this recommended somewhere as the product that gives Bravo housewives shiny hair and it really delivers.

• Clarins lip comfort oil. Maybe my favorite lip tint, and I own like 35.

• COLOR WOW Raise the Root spray. I found out about this on TikTok. I spray when damp and it DOES give my flat Asian hair volume. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

What you should get our loved ones

• Nippon Kodo Mori-no-KOH incense. I love this! Incredible bang for your buck, the little box feels so fancy, it smells insane. I’m burning it right now as I write.

• The Loewe tomato candle. S got me this because he loves me, and I’ve been panicking because I’m almost done burning it and I feel like I cannot spend $130 on a candle to replace it. But it’s just so good.

• RIRA glasses. Very expensive for glasses but I got S these for his birthday and they are so delightful. They are proper goblets, heavy and chunky, and come in such fun colors.

• Comme Si hooded cashmere scarf. I want this soooo bad. Unfortunately I will not be spending $380 on it since I live in San Francisco and do not actually need it. But you could!

• Diptyque scented oval in 34. This will be my own Christmas gift to myself. I got sniped by this awesome Substack post and now want everything she mentions in it.

• D’Annam Strawberry Mochi. Okay, blind buying a perfume is high risk high reward, but this really smells just like strawberry mochi. Tammy and I both own it and I just love it.

• Anything by Ted Muehling, for cerebral women who appreciate both nature and beauty :)

Secondhand

• I’m a Georg Jensen superfan. This carafe gives me heart palpitations.

• Get a vintage tray from Etsy for perfume storage.

• While we’re at it, what about a cute vintage butter dish?

• Minaudieres are just so chic.

  

ALISHA

Alisha is the COO of Sourced By and lives on the Lower East Side of New York with her fiancé and her cavalier king charles, Goose.

I landed on each of these gifts using one simple rule: does it pass the covet test? A good rule of thumb for a gift. These are all items I own and/or would love to see under my Christmas tree.

Match Pewter Frame — A little gilded detail to elevate any shelf or nightstand. The shape and size is so, so sweet.

UNDO Hairware Claw Clip — Any piece by them is fantastic. The grip, the soft edges, the pretty colors! I personally always need my hair up to focus (don’t ask me why) so I always have one of these in my bag.

Fara Homidi Essential Lip Duet — A small luxury! I am a sucker for a lip product and try them all. This is the real deal. The blue is also such a fun pop in a makeup bag.

King Cookbook — One of my favorite restaurants in the city came out with a cookbook! For the friend who loves good food, good ambiance, and good company. Every recipe hits.

Vintage Opera Glasses — Something whimsical! One of my best friends and I exchanged opera glasses a few years back and now our annual pilgrimage to the met opera is so much more dramatic and amazing.

ANDREW

Andrew is a partner at Sequoia and a founding subscriber of Bookbear eExpress.

For Bookbear subscribers with kids (or giving gifts to families with kids), I would highly recommend Story Time Chess. It brings the rules of chess to life by giving the different pieces their own backstories. Rules are tedious; stories are fun.

The original Teva sandal is $60, super durable, really great for the woods, and they look cool. I never understood why everyone wants Birkenstocks, these are way better.

Get someone a skateboard. How cool must it feel for someone to give you a skateboard? That they would think you’d be someone who could ride a skateboard, someone who should have a skateboard. Small garage footprint too.

ANNE

Anne is an engineer turned marketer and currently leads many Marketing teams at Ramp. She enjoys making impossible things possible (like creating a Super Bowl ad in under 7 days), loves travel and design, and splits time between NYC and SF. She’s basically non-existent online, as evidenced by her X account, but DM her if you want Marketing or gift giving advice (no promises if she sees it!).

I spend a truly embarrassing amount of time hunting for the perfect gift for someone. I believe the best gifts are emotional and take effort to procure (with most of the effort centered around observing and learning details about the personal - to be loved is to be seen, after all):

• Is there something they’ve been eyeing for months but haven’t purchased? Get it for them!

• Is there an experience they’d love but would never get for themselves? Is there anything going on in their life that you can take into account? Examples:

• Have they been wanting to overhaul their closet? Get them a closet styling session!

• Did they just have a baby? Perhaps an organic meal delivery service for a few days would help!

• Are they really stressed? Is there a decadent spa or really fun experience that will provide a break from their week to week?

• What’s something they love collecting? Can you do something fun with it?

Those are just thought starters though and don’t leave you with very practical advice, which I am a sucker for. So I’ve listed options below if you’re in a pinch and don’t have the time or opportunity to collect this information. I personally guarantee people will be delighted to receive these - if not, ask Ava for my email and I’ll rectify the situation (I will though begin the call by telling you that your friend probably doesn’t have good taste). I’d characterize most of these gifts as “generally delightful” and under the “elevated essentials” category.

• Comme Si cashmere socks (second mention, third if you count my double mention): Hands down the best cashmere socks - cozy, luxurious, classic, and practical! This year, you can buy them with a giftbox to add a touch of whimsy.

• Smythson Portobello notebook: Or any notebook from Smythson for that matter! There are so many options available, you can select a fun one that speaks more to their humor and sensibility. Smythson notebooks last forever, are beautiful and functional, and can also be personalized.

• Charvet slippers: These are my favorite slippers, you can’t go wrong with a slipper (especially ones from Charvet).

• Pettinaroli: Anything from this delightful Milan store. You can WhatsApp or call the shop (+39 02 8646 4642) to figure out what they have available, but note that you will need to place your order via WhatsApp. Make sure to add a monogram.

• Aspinal of London travel wallet or hotel souvenirs from previous or upcoming trips: For the frequent traveler, . If you’ve recently gone on a trip together or have one coming up at a hotel with chic merch, that’s always a fun option. For example, the change tray or ashtray from Il Pellicano. It’ll remind them of the good times you had or get them excited for the upcoming trip!

• Flamingo Estate Essentials Set: Anything from Flamingo Estate is great for someone who loves to cook. Pro tip: add the strawberries.

• Bonilla a la Visa potato chips: Behold, the fanciest and most difficult-to-procure potato chips for your friend who loves to host. Show up with a few of these and wrap ‘em in a cute little bow (just make sure to order one extra to share on the spot).

• Ginori 1735 teacups or coasters: Anything from Ginori is exquisite and a love letter to traditional Florentine craftsmanship. Perfect for a friend who loves to enjoy a cup of tea at home.

• Rocky’s matcha set: Best matcha, need I say more?

• La Double J espresso cups and coffee beans from their favorite coffee shop. Give them a delightful way to start their morning.

• Makoto Koizumi Yure Cup and a bottle of their favorite sake. These little guys are a delight to drink from and look great on a shelf.

CHRIS

Chris lives in San Francisco.

For a beloved bookworm, skip the brodernist doorstop and subscribe them to the Paris Review. Sophisticated but undemanding, it’ll draw them away from the Substack app at least once a quarter, and print looks great on a coffee table. If you know a hypebeast who seems to have it all, go for the Rick Owens x Selahatin toothpaste—with “Verbena, Sichuan pepper, juniper and dark citrus” you get to blur the line between “it’s an essential” and “it’s a weird flex.” If you’ve got a neurotic parent, get them a water leak sensor and help them set it up. If it never goes off, you’ve gifted peace of mind; if it does, you’ll be their favorite child.

DEVIN

Devin is a builder/marketer/artist/community builder who previously founded mad realities which is most infamous for the crypto dating show post pandemic era and most recently was working on marketing at the browser co. An almost a 10-year New yorker, she is spending more time on both coasts in 2026.

Looking back on the gifts I find myself giving again and again, alongside some of my favorite gifts I’ve received recently, here are a few recommendations I genuinely stand by this holiday season:

• A universal gift for any level of closeness. If you need a gift that works regardless of how well you know someone, the Aesop Reverence Aromatique Hand Wash with the little grainy pumice is chefs kiss. It’s my go-to gift whenever I stay over at someone’s place since it’s functional, elevated, and a good price point. (Disclaimer: as a man, you may run the risk of coming off as ran through to women who visit your home).

• For the ones who host. As someone who hosts fairly often, I’ve learned that two things really make a gathering feel good are music and lighting. For music, I am a fan of the Marshall Acton III speaker (if you are looking for a playlist to play on said speakers, DM me). For lighting, I think candle holders and a set of tapers is a thoughtful pair. You could go with cool chrome candle holders or a more vintage, antique-style depending on the person.

• Simply a Devin-approved, great item. If there were one product I’d happily influence any woman on at the moment, it’s the Jones Road Miracle Balm. It’s really nice and glowy and lasts for an absurdly long time (my favorites are Dusty Rose and Pinky Bronze). A close runner-up in this category is the DedCool Xtra Milk fragrance (second mention) which I get a ton of compliments on any time I wear.

• Made with love. Last but definitely not least, my favorite kind of gift lately is something made by hand. If you have any creative outlet and would enjoy spending an hour making something personal, it often means more than anything you can buy. For example, I recently painted a watercolor of my sister’s dogs floating on lily pads, but if your medium is words, I’m a huge fan of these “Why You’re So Awesome” books (I’ve filled out 5+ of these in my life so far)

MOLLY

Molly Mielke McCarthy runs Moth Fund and enjoys everything creative.

I love crafting, and few things bring me greater joy than gifting my creations to the people I love. This year I got really into cyanotype prints, which I’ve been putting in floating frames and wrapping with yarn and lavender to give as holiday gifts. Last year I made everyone candles and before that, pearl jewelry. Other gifts I’ve been giving include vintage jewelry boxes from ebay like this, Crown Affair claw clips, Line and Current earrings, and this lovely cup I’ve enjoyed for over 10 years. One of my favorite gifts I’ve ever received was a Orfeo Tagiuri print, which is now available as a book.

PAIGE

Paige is an engineer based in Berkeley who doesn’t really have an online presence anymore and wants to keep it that way.

1. Comme Si Silk Boxers (third mention, fourth if you count my double mention… they’re the best)

Self-explanatory. Expensive pajamas are a great gift.

2. Earrings by Gabriella Kiss. I love receiving jewelry, 99% of the jewelry I own was gifted. Assuming you’re gifting jewelry according to the receiver’s tastes, it’s a perfectly sentimental gift. Gabrielle Kiss is an exceptionally talented artist who makes really incredible pieces that often incorporate elements of nature in ingenious ways. Pictured are her eggplant earrings.

3. Nippon kodo incense booklets (second mention)

The packaging of this incense is beautiful and compact and it comes with a ceramic holder that looks great on a desk or nightstand. I love the aloeswood scent.

4. Criterion Collection Wes Anderson Archive

I think this is a great gift. Wes Anderson’s worlds are so fascinating, there’s at least one film in his collection that anyone would love. Also a great collector’s item.

5. $100 Ebay gift card

Listen, there is a ridiculous amount of waste in the world and there are many perfectly useful things we can buy secondhand! I love eBay. There is something for everyone on there. Also, everyone loves a good deal. I recently purchased a like-new portable document scanner for $5 (originally ~$100).

6. Le Creuset Fondue set by Enzo Mari

Fondue is one of the coziest dishes you can eat and it’s also fun and interactive. This fondue set from the 80s is really cute.

7. Mariage Frères Esprit de Noël tea

Mariage Frères makes great tea and their canisters are aesthetically pleasing and can be reused. I’m a big fan of their black teas, Esprit de Noël in particular is a flavorful black tea with holiday spices.

TAMMY

Tammy is the commissioning editor for Stripe Press, and is currently working on a project about tacit knowledge.

• I love a great lip balm, especially in the winter. After my scientific study (n=3) of 5 different balms/lip treatments: Eadem, Ole Henricksen, Experiment Beauty, Topicals, and Laneige, Experiment emerged as the winner. Their balms don’t contain fragrance and aren’t pigmented, so they’re also a safer buy than some of the others (Ole Henricksen is my #2).

• Calpak Terra Duffle Backpack. I travel quite a bit for work and unfortunately I have not evolved beyond being the kind of person who has to pack every possible thing to be prepared for Any Scenario, so I need a ludicrously capacious carry-on/personal item. Calpak achieves that rare trifecta of being useful, comfortable, and pretty enough. Can’t say the same for my Longchamp duffle (elegant, but too unstructured) or my large Beis weekender (the worst thing I’ve ever done to my left shoulder). For a cheaper alternative, I like Calpak’s Luka Duffel or Baggu’s Cloud duffel.

• One idea I think is cute is to create an experience jar (particularly fun for couples, but works for friends too) with 5-10 experiences which they can redeem throughout some designated stretch of time (ideally six months or less). The key is to personalize it for them, and you can even leave 1-2 free spaces for them to fill in. My list includes a broadway or ballet show and a day in which we eat our way through one of the many Google Maps lists I have saved, but also simpler things, like ‘watch The Departed’ (I just saw The Godfather for the first time, sue me!!). Everyone I know is So Busy, so this a great way to prompt quality time.

• Fragrance discovery sets! I’m a fraghead, but I find the experience of in-store fragrance shopping to be totally overwhelming, and results have been…mixed when I’ve tried to help friends find a fragrance this way. Some of my favorites: d’annam (I love the Japan set (second mention)). Le Labo is another; I love them in particular because their fragrances are high-quality but don’t project dramatically (this one contains all of my favorites). I’m also Escentric Molecules-curious, but haven’t tried theirs yet.

• VINTAGE MAGAZINES! Trawling through the archives of LIFE, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic has been a favorite pastime of mine for years. Anyone who does any kind of creative work will probably find something to adore in the stories, yes, but also in the imagery (it’s rare to find anything near the quality of Margaret Bourke-White’s work in today’s magazines). Right now I’m particularly taken with FORTUNE magazine. I love frivolous-ish writing about industrialists, and all the evidence suggests they had much more fun spending their money than today’s industrialists. Etsy sellers and local bookstores are your best bets here.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Bathtub

Hello! If you’re new here you can find the previous posts in this friendship series here:

1. Radical fun - on the friendship theory of everything

2. Prioritize your favorite people

3. How do I meet more people I like?

All of these posts are available to paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting my work!

I would greatly appreciate you filling out the Bookbear Express friendship survey if you have not already!

i. What’s the difference?

What’s the difference between friendship and romance? As far as I’m concerned, not much. Personally, I believe that close friendships are inherently romantic because they are inherently intimate. (The same may not apply to your gym buddy.) If you’re spending extended amounts of time together, sharing your deepest feelings, and having a lot of fun together, there’s inherently a level of intensity and depth there that’s somewhat romantic.

So, what is the difference?

Here’s how I see it, coming from a non-polyamorous but friendship-centered perspective:

1. Friendship uses romantic circuitry—I do think people can pairbond with their friends

2. However, friendship typically does not involve sexual intimacy OR any kind of romantic exclusivity. It also tends to not involve the structural closeness present in romantic relationships (sleeping in the same bed, traveling together all the time, etc)

3. Successful friendships are ones in which both people are satisfied with that equilibrium, and so are their respective romantic partners

The last point, of course, can be tricky. Close friends of the opposite gender obviously can cause friction in relationships, but I’ve witnessed a few situations where two people were dating and one person was jealous of the other’s same-gender best friend (everyone involved was heterosexual). It can feel terrible when you feel jealous of your boyfriend’s girl best friend, but oddly even worse if they seem to prefer their best guy friend over you.

Friendship certainly can inspire envy, even when it’s not about sexual or romantic competition. I remember being in my late teens and early 20s and dating these guys who seemed to have their lives perfectly together. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around them, auditioning for the role of partner. I was envious of their friends who fit so easily into their lives, and experienced none of the insecurity and fraughtness I did. When you’re unsure of someone’s love, it’s hard not to envy the people who seem to take it for granted.

The Bookbear Express Friendship survey unsurprisingly suggests that the vast majority of you are comfortable with opposite gender friendships. I like to think that all of us True Blue Friendship Believers are comfortable with opposite gender platonic intimacy, but I also get that it’s controversial in our culture at large. I’ve had two or three (2.5, let’s say) close friends who totally cut me (and all their other female friends) off after getting into relationships where their partner was not comfortable with opposite gender friendships. It was, to be frank, totally devastating. I did not make any attempt to change their minds, though I did grumble to all our friends for a fair bit afterwards. I like to think that it’s better to live my values than to debate them.

ii. What if you want to date your friend, or your friend wants to date you?

Early friendship

I find this to be most common in early friendship. Sometimes you meet someone and there’s amazing chemistry, but the two of you disagree about the implications of the chemistry.

Here’s the thing: chemistry doesn’t mean compatibility. If someone passes the six hour conversation test and they’re also kinda cute, it can be natural to wonder if the two of you should date. But if they don’t feel the same way, there is usually a deeper reason that may not be visible to you. That’s why I like to say that the best way to get over a crush is to ask questions. They might simply have different physical preferences, or worry that your attachment style is not compatible with theirs, or something even more arbitrary. For instance, I have a lot of Enneagram 7 friends, but I am not interested in dating 7s. I find that we have very different relationships with pain.

I find the best strategy if you’re interested in a friend is to make a gentle move, and see if it’s reciprocated. If it isn’t, accept their preferences. A “gentle move” can be something as simple as sitting closer to them on the bench or couch and seeing if they lean in or subtly scooch away from you. It really can be that simple!

I struggle with rejecting people

If you struggle with rejecting people, you probably have a fear of conflict and bad boundaries. Don’t worry, this is the most common thing in the world. But I really suggest you try to get over it.

Don’t worry, the person you reject is going to be perfectly fine. They may be crying, screaming, throwing up, and telling you they need you, but they do not need you. They are going to be okay. I have been cried on, screamed at and thrown up on, and all of those people were perfectly fine and have great partners now. I have cried and screamed at people and here I am, perfectly intact. It’s really just not that dramatic.

People should date if they both want to date. That is the only reason to date. Do not let yourself feel guilty about anything else. Just say no politely and tell them you’d rather be friends (ONLY if you genuinely want to be friends!).

Late friendship

This is harder! If someone you know really well wants to date you, the reason they think it will work is probably grounded in a deeper truth. But that still doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for the two of you.

I do think people date, break up and successfully recover the friendship. But I also know that it’s common for it to affect the dynamic negatively for a significant period of time, similar to working with a friend. My general advice is to exercise caution.

One of my guy friends believes that finding a life partner is so valuable and important that you should be willing to risk any number of friendships to test whether the person is the right partner for you. I find this very romantic, but there are a couple of friends I actually regret dating, because they were really weird about it after the fact and I honestly would have rather kept the friendship.

In general, I see this as a “risk it for the biscuit” situation. The rewards are great, but the dangers are certainly present.

iii. In general, should we date our friends?

I deeply believe in a “friends first, friends after” model of romantic relationships. I think there is an unfortunate epidemic of people out there who are dating people who they would never be friends with.

I remain good friends with S, whom I was in a relationship with for nearly seven years. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most important might be that we had platonic chemistry in addition to romantic chemistry. Physical attraction aside, we can yap on the phone for an hour, watch TV, and hang out. We like gossiping together. We like each other.

In my late teens/early 20s, I dated people whom I fell in love with, but didn’t really… like. If I weren’t attracted to them, I could never imagine just sitting on a couch chatting and drinking wine. We had different communication styles, different interests, different friends. At the time, I would’ve never believed this was a problem—I liked my boyfriend, of course I liked my boyfriend. But the truth was, I probably didn’t like my boyfriend as much as his friends liked him. That’s the beautiful thing about friendship: someone who likes you so much they just want to spend hours of their life with you for no reason than the fact that they enjoy the pleasure of your company.

It’s only more recently that I’ve realized I want to be liked by my partner the way my friends like me. My therapist helped me realize that I had a pattern when it came to partners: I chose people who were wildly in love with me, but also made me feel bad about certain aspects of my personality. Why are you doing this, it makes me jealous, I think you’re attention-seeking, you stress me out, etc etc. I’d always internalized this as my own problem—I thought I was easy to like as a friend, and harder to like as a partner. But my therapist had a different take: she said, Maybe you just choose to date people who don’t like you as much as your friends do.

Read more

Pierre Bonnard, Stairs in the Artist’s Garden, 1942

Housekeeping: Please fill out this friendship survey! We have ~200 responses so far but it would be wonderful to get to 300-400. It’s 40 questions, your responses will be used for the rest of the book and it will be so very appreciated. There is some chance I will contact you to interview you if something feels particularly resonant with the project :) Thank you very very very much!

I make the same extremely simple salad every week, sometimes multiple times a week: heirloom tomatoes (if in season), avocado, red onion, tinned fish and lemon. As a kid, I was obsessed with a similarly rudimentary dish: tomato and egg scramble, a dish commonly served in Chinese student canteens. There’s not much in life I find more supremely pleasurable than eating tomatoes in soup, gazpacho, Bloody Mary, salad and stew form. An unusual number of my fantasies center around splitting cioppino.

That’s a figure of speech, by the way. One of the weirdest things about me is that I rarely fantasize about anything. I don’t tell people that because they find it strange. But if I had to fantasize about something, it would be us sitting at the bar of a North Beach restaurant eating cioppino, and I would be wearing those white Dolce and Gabbana corduroy pants I got off Depop that are slightly tight on my butt, and I would probably splatter tomato stew all over them, and you would laugh. Like any good cult leader, I’m addicted to wearing white.

On TikTok Mina said the key to developing personal style is to have a list of codes, symbols and themes that you follow every year like a fashion house. I always return to the same motifs, wearing white, eating tomatoes, reading books. I was thinking that I don’t know if there’s a place I associate more with comfort and safety than the Guildford branch of the Surrey Public Library. Gray carpet with teal and chartreuse linear accents. Ugly blue lounge chairs. I went there every day for a summer to do SAT prep. I would read there for a few hours, get some sort of iced frappuccino drink at the Blenz Coffee upstairs and then walk to Guildford Mall across the street to investigate what I could buy with my allowance. Which was, most of the time, one nut-covered chocolate ice cream bar from Purdy’s. My mom would pick me up, we would gossip in the car.

The most important thing growing up has taught me is that in every important way I am just like the girl I was. Everything I loved at 15, I love at 29. And all the things that I desperately wanted back then that I thought would complete me have been so nice to have, more than nice, but they were just gravy. I could go back to Oishi and get the $10 lunch combo and then buy Revlon’s Really Red at the Rexall and apply it to my chapped lips in the fluorescent lighting of the girls’ bathroom and appreciate it so much more now. Hanging out in Mr. Pocock’s classroom during lunch hour and after school with my friends was the point of it all. I have a better haircut now and I know how to use lip liner and I don’t get nervous at parties and I feel comfortable in my body and I can buy the clothes I want and those are all lovely accoutrements of adulthood. But I figured out the meaning of life a long time ago—reading a book under the table while the teacher talked, whispering with my friends. It just took me a while to realize.

Subscribe now

*

I get high off the vertiginous rush of being loved by you. I remember the exact moment I decided it’s fine to let you take care of me. You’re so good at it.

Sometimes I feel like a sea sponge or a mollusk. It’s not to say I’m so good at meeting my own needs, because I’m wildly dependent on other people, but I’ve architected an ecosystem that satisfies me. I write, I work, I see the people I love. There are moments I find my own placidity disturbing. I can charm any girl, feel comfortable in any room. It was never going to be a question of whether I can make you happy.

Can you make me happy? When I let you take care of me, I also let you disrupt me, arrange me, open me up. It’s so uncomfortable to let you feel me in that particular way. I’m scared of you in the exact same way you’re scared of me. We have different vocabularies, but I think we feel the same thing.

I’m gentle, except for when I’m violent. I’m receptive, except for when I’m aggressive. I should smash my phone. It would make you happy to buy me a new one. Which is the same impulse as how I can’t bear to let you walk around the world wearing pants that don’t fit quite right.

Byzantine empires, lives of the saints. I can get overintellectual with the best of them. But I think we both know that isn’t the point of it all.

Reading recommendations

Romantasy at the end of the world. Has culture stalled? Groove Theory, 30 years later: “There are more ways to fall out of love than there are to fall in love. Statistics tell that story. Your friend, crying on the end of a phone for the second time this year, tells that story. The velocity of the crush when measured against the exhaustion of several realities tells that story. And so, the circle makes sense to me. The series of returns makes sense, to say, I am not done seeking you, I am not done figuring out every way the light can fall over every part of you it hasn’t been fortunate enough to fall upon yet.” Becca Rothfeld on what it means to value “women as women.” “Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal".”

Rainer Fetting

Housekeeping: I have an ask for you wonderful, wonderful people: please fill out this friendship survey! It’s 40 questions, your responses will be used for the rest of the book and it will be so very appreciated. There is some chance I will contact you to interview you if something feels particularly resonant with the project :) Thank you very very very much in advance!

i. What am I looking for?

If this is a topic that interests you, know that you’re not alone: this is the number one thing people ask me about. Cute girls want to know how to meet more female friends. Guys with successful careers tell me they haven’t made any new friends since college. A great friend group, like a marriage, is both intensely desirable and elusive for many.

Like many girls watching Sex and the City as a teenager, I was so taken by the idea of the quartet. I was already convinced that gossip, or the thoughtful circulation of privileged knowledge, would be one of the great projects of my life. My guy friend recently described his view of female friendship thus: “Two girls get together and discuss the third. Then the other two get together and discuss the third.” To which I replied: “Don’t you get that that’s the whole point?” The whole point of choosing friends is to pick people you don’t mind being dissected by because you fell in love with their analysis. Friendship is about a communal understanding of morality, sharing aesthetic preferences like lovers share germs, ruminating over the challenges of your friends’ relationships like they’re your own, talking, talking, talking. Jealousy, envy, attachment, compersion, companionship, coming together and pulling apart.

I’ll say it again: friendship is about sharing norms. For example, the norm that gossip should be constructive, utopian, never vicious. As a group or even in a pair of two, you should construct norms together. But how do you find people who you like enough to construct norms with?

Here are three things that you should be looking for in new friends:

• chemistry

• values

• alignment.

Chemistry is the six hour hangout test: do you just feel viscerally alive in their presence? Are they consistently extremely interesting to talk to? Do you just love being around them?

Values are something that’s rarely articulated in friendship but I find to be deeply important. Do you guys like the same people and dislike the same people? Do you have some shared sense of what is right and what is wrong? Are you similarly optimistic or pessimistic about the world?

Alignment is about whether they’re in a space in their life when they’re receptive to new close friendships. Reciprocity is as important in friendship as it is in anything else: it’s hard to sustain an asymmetrical friendship. Sometimes people already have a fulfilling friend group, or they’re too busy with work to be fully open to new relationships. I like to think that I’m always open to new friendships, but it’s also true that I’m currently at a point in my life where I can barely keep up with all the friends I already have. That means I’m still open to meeting people, but I also don’t have the radical openness I had, say, in 2022 when I moved to New York and felt like I didn’t know anyone.

ii. Where do you find these people?

Here are some of the answers you guys gave when I asked how you’d made new friends as an adult. (More answers in the thread, really worth checking out if you haven’t.)

Organizing in my city/neighborhood, friends of friends, saying yes to every event invite

At the gym! It’s a personal training studio with only about 4 or 5 of us at a time. Very varied population but I’ve met some gems in my 70’s!

I think I’ve maybe been a bit lucky but I’ve made so many great friends through work! Especially at chaotic start-ups, you build a lot of camaraderie lol

Volunteering. Silly sports leagues. Saying hello to strangers.

Friends of friends. I highly prioritize friendships as a barometer for people I like.

At least one new lifelong friend every year. Meet 100 people a year, keep one or two.

Parties, friends (we all try to bring new people to parties and dinners occasionally), concerts, dating apps, exercise or yoga classes.

Sometimes strike convos with other bicyclists on the bart. Stopped someone I saw reading a Joe Campbell book outside neighborhood wine bar

I try to go to every party I’m invited to by work friends. If I find that I have chemistry (not in the romantic sense most of the time) with people, I make it a point to talk to them and show interest in their life, tease/make jokes, make sure your genuine interest in them shines through by highlighting shared activities/interests and actually crystallize potential plans! Follow up to “We should go fishing sometime!” with “Okay! I’m free Sunday early afternoon, how about you?” Instead of “yes we should!”

Diving into a community of something I’m passionate about (tennis) and really investing in it.

Deepening relationship, giving back to others, etc. Being an active part of the community then led me to meet some of my closest inner circle friends

40 now. Have a small set of good friends made in my 20s from work/education paths. Made some close friends in 30s through our kids. We would usually connect on some level above generic parent talk during birthday parties etc which would lead to drinks, joint family dinners at restaurants and then trips to cabins etc. Now we don’t a bunch of stuff in our community and our friends help. It feels like we’re all building something together.

1) At niche events of odd sincere interests: for example the Trust Community in Berlin which is an eclectic group of indie researchers and freelancers weakly tied together by a cybernetics library

2) Online, through writing essays, which people then reach out to discuss and talk about

3) At work conferences, specifically finding people who do adjacent (not the same) job as I do, usually which have been in the industry a long time

4) At house parties and pregames, often friends of friends

Primarily an awesome ACX meetup

Also improv classes, acting classes, open board game days. I saw this tweet a while ago about increasing your IRL surface area and the more I do that the more friends I make!

I think the moral of these answers is 1) that you have to find the location that resonates with you, whether it’s work, improv classes, tennis, yoga, or BART, and 2) you can literally meet friends anywhere if you’re open to it. I think the concept of “IRL surface area” as mentioned above is great, and echoes dating advice I give friends, which is: how is the love of your life going to find you if you literally never leave the house? Do you think they’re gonna break in? (This does not apply if you’re happily DMing people on Twitter. After all I did at age 15 once meet a boy on Omegle while in search of people to talk about Nabokov with.)

Here are some places where I have met people over the past 10 years:

Read more