best practices

+ matchmaking is open :)

Egon Schiele, Danae, 1909

Reminder that matchmaking is open!!! Typeform payments are working again so you don’t have to Venmo me anymore. (For international readers who emailed me because couldn’t make Venmo work, don’t worry about it!) Please make sure you fill out your gender and sexual orientation correctly because this has caused a lot of issues in the past.

It’s all so simple. But often you have to take the long way around to understand how simple best practices are. In work, in life, in my personal life, the thing I find myself asking most often is just: Do you think that’s a good idea? As in: is this really, really the thing you want to do? Do you think it makes sense?

I know that question can come across as judgmental. It reads as Why are you being dumb? But the truth is, I’ve made so many subpar decisions in my own life. Those choices were what was available to me at the time, and they’re choices I had to make in order to work through things. I don’t regret any of my decisions, but I do look back and marvel at how simple it all is and how complicated I made it.

When I think back to dating in my late teens and early 20s, before I got together with S, I can easily see that those relationships didn’t work out for one reason: I was too young and immature. That’s literally it. I didn’t know what I wanted, I didn’t know how to properly express myself, I was still becoming a person. It’s funny recalling how many hundreds of hours of analysis went into what I did wrong when really it was very simple.

The truth is, when things work out, it does often feel improbable. Love always feels like you’re getting away with something. But if things are going great you probably don’t need to analyze! Like, if you are a 22-year-old dating a 45-year-old and it’s going amazing… you don’t need my life advice, or any life advice at all. But if it’s not going well, it’s probably not going well for a pretty simple reason.

I don’t know why we experience such an urge to complicate things. Every person I know, including myself, is always convinced their situation is exceptional, that the circumstances require further examination. But the most useful thing I’ve learned is that you’re probably better off if you skip the rumination and follow common sense advice.

For instance: if someone in your life is acting weird, you should probably ask them what’s going on. If asking fails to produce a straightforward answer, I would encourage you to just let them be weird, and re-engage with them when they start acting normal again. That doesn’t mean you can’t listen to them, care about them, or support them. It just means that you don’t need to treat their behavior as your responsibility to solve.

I am so, so addicted to playing detective. I am grateful for this quality, since it is probably what makes me a fiction reader and fiction writer, but it’s also what makes me qualified to stress that playing detective is not very useful or rewarding behavior. One common trap I see people get stuck in is being in an unhappy relationship and obsessing over why the beginning of their relationship was great, and how they can go back to that. The very simple truth is that you cannot go back; the relationship was great because rubber had not yet hit the road and the realities of your personality had not yet collided with the reality of theirs. Many people are very lovely in a bubble. That doesn’t mean anything about who they are outside the bubble. Again: simple, but it can feel impossible to accept.

Doing the right thing is not addition, it’s subtraction. It’s letting things be simple instead of complicated. It’s infinitely easier said than done, and it requires the humility of knowing that you don’t have—can’t have—all the answers. Why did she do that? Could it have been different if I’d acted differently? Should I blame him, or me? For me, the hardest thing in the world half of the time is just letting things be. I want to investigate! I want to theorize and analyze. But most of the time, the most relevant question is: to what end?

Solving the mystery doesn’t mean I’ll get closure. It’s a fantasy: If I only knew, I could feel better, I could let it go. As best I understand it, knowing why and letting go are two separate things. You can’t prove out every counterfactual. At some point, you have to just let things be, and if the point can occur earlier, you can save yourself a lot of time and grief.

Life really does come down to the simplest maxims. Date someone you’re attracted to. Don’t date someone who’s mean to you. Be close to people who are great communicators. When you feel like you’ve lost perspective, ask your closest friends for advice. If you know you have to do something really hard, don’t delay it unnecessarily. It is very, very difficult to outrun your problems. Try to understand your patterns or else you will end up repeating your mistakes. We can’t control other people, we can only love them. Pay attention to the red flags. Be kind and tactful whenever possible.

Often when people describe relationship problems to me they’ll say something along the lines of, This person did something sketchy/mean/avoidant/questionable. And I’ll be like, Great, sounds like you should engage less. And inevitably they’ll be like: I know, but… And I’ve so been there so I totally get it, but it doesn’t make it any less painful. I always want to shake them and just say: There is no but! This person is not a textbook for you to study or a problem for you to solve. When you engage with them in that way, you are treating them more like a charity case or an unresolved murder than a person. Either you’re in a relationship where the two of you can collaboratively solve the problem, or you aren’t and there’s nothing you can do about it. Best practices are best practices for a reason.