Negative Space
Find your dating away from the content
This blog has already ranged over a good number of topics, from science to markets, talking and doing, desire and resentment. These aren’t completely random; for the most part, this blog is also trying to follow a roadmap for a book. The first chapter of Second Person was about dating advice. This post wraps up the second chapter, about dating discourse. There are also two main themes I tried to thread through each post that are worth pointing at more explicitly.
The first theme is that dating should be personalized. And not just personalized to you, in your unique situation with your unique traits, but also personalized to the unique person you hope to date, the second person. There are many complaints about dating in the aggregate; the more clearly you can differentiate who you are and what you’re looking for the less these broad complaints matter.
The second theme is agency and motivation. People are strangely fatalistic and passive in their dating lives. Some just want to indulge in the discourse and complain. But even daters with a positive attitude often get stuck on the outside, waiting to learn all the rules, tips, and tricks of the game before jumping in. But, like tightrope walking or alligator wrestling, dating is learned by doing.
These two themes are very often the same thing.
Everyone has already heard most common dating advice, but people don’t execute. Why is that? At best, common dating advice teaches you to be broadly appealing. But following all the advice could only make you a fraction as broadly appealing as if you were hotter, younger, richer, or more famous. It hardly seems worth the effort. At worst, generic advice is about withholding affection to keep a half-interested date hooked on you for another hour or another month. You don’t execute on that because it’s not what you really want.
Imagine if you could get personal advice instead. “Nora loves paintings just as much you do, invite her to the art fair and ask her about expressionism!” If you could get this sort advice you’d be eager to act on it right away, you’d expect it to be fun and fruitful. If dating advice feels like a chore, it’s because it’s not really for you.
The same goes for discourse, which often consists of the overly generalized resentments of one sex against the other. It makes dating feel hopeless until some larger issue with society is solved, until men learn to be men or Zoomers get off their phones or the Fed cuts interest rates. And since there’s little hope of these being resolved in the near future, your own interest rate in dating suffers accordingly.
My main message so far has been: dating content is mostly harmful to dating, primarily acting as a substitute to it instead of a complement. But it can only harm you to the extent you pay attention to it. You can stop reading advice listicles, looking for science to tell you whether women like assholes, or feeding the toxoplasma. Or at least, you can stop taking it all seriously and at face value. Instead, you can just observe your own life, introspect on your desires, build a practice from what you already do for fun.
But if you’re immersed in content, and since you’re here I suspect you might be, you can also use it to your advantage. The personal and the actionable can be found in the negative space around the content, the parts that don’t quite fit.
When you read dating advice, you usually think, “Yeah, I should get better at this.” If something seems so obvious you’re surprised it even needs to be stated, you probably just skip to the next tip. But if it’s there, it means that someone needs to hear it.
I know that talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.
- Sasha Chapin, 50 things I know
The dating advice you don’t need to hear is your dating talent. Most dating advice is about shoring up your weaknesses, becoming another well-rounded ball in the Tinder ball pit. Personalized dating means doubling down on your strengths in the faith that someone out there values them to overlook your weaknesses. And when you meet that person, you may find out that they love you just as much for those supposed weaknesses you never got rid of.
If you ever read dating advice aimed at the opposite sex, you usually think “yeah, they should get better at this.” If something makes you say instead “oh no, please don’t follow this!” then you’ve found your target.
Girls are often encouraged to be reserved on the first date: don’t talk a lot, don’t eat or drink much, don’t be loud or bring up topics or debate him or cause a scene. Ladies, if you’ve been struggling with modesty and moderation on dates, please stop struggling and DM me.
Noticing where the discourse rubs you the wrong way can similarly serve as a pointer. Whatever criticism of your own sex feels most infuriating in how unfair and overgeneralized it is, it could point to a way you’re positively differentiated in the dating market. One example for me is being entirely unconcerned with a woman’s body count. For many years I didn’t realize this was particularly unusual, let alone something women would value. Only after I read countless complaints about slut shaming and the double standard for promiscuity did I realize how rare and important it is for women not to feel judged for their pasts by men around them.
Whatever complaint about the opposite sex you strongly agree with, someone out there thinks it’s really unfair. And while it’s reasonable to be worried about “pick-mes” and anyone performatively “not like the others”, this performance only works because some people are genuinely not like the others!
And finally:
Philosophy is mainly useful in inoculating you against other philosophy. Else you'll be vulnerable to the first coherent philosophy you hear.
The same is true of dating philosophy. If you’ve ever dipped your toe in the manosphere, you won’t be shocked that FemaleDatingStrategy treats all men like slightly evil retards to be manipulated. If you’re familiar with “anti-cis-het queer liberation” spaces that mostly consist of people indulging in kinks and power games, you know that “cottagecore tradwifism” serves the exact same purpose.
No matter how much of a joke this appears to be from the outside, at least some people on the inside sincerely believe it to be the whole of dating wisdom in the world. But there is more to dating on heaven and earth than is dreamt of by all the dating philosophies combined. It’s a big space out there.
If nothing else, immersion in dating content should give you a feel for how content-brained someone else is. You should be able to tell if someone is blissfully unaware, curious but clearheaded, or completely subsumed. Ask yourself: where in dating space is your ideal partner?
And what about their ideal partner?