Welcome to the Second Person

The beginning of a great relationship.

Dating is tough. Here’s how the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, does it:

“… the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity. Some species of insect have evolved aedeagal spines, which damage the female reproductive tract. This has led to females using various techniques to resist mating.”

While one half of all bed bugs is pouring its resources into evolving ever-thornier penises, the other half is running from mating altogether. You’d expect the whole species to have gone extinct by now. Yet, somehow, I see more bed bugs around than ever, and it’s not because they’re seeking me out for dating advice. It’s my human friends who constantly complain about how difficult and frustrating dating is.

So, let us examine the mating habits of Homo sapiens:

Most humans live in cities alongside thousands of singles of the appropriate sex, whom they are free to court. Human courtship involves engaging in leisure together, drinking, having sex, and talking about yourself a lot — four things that humans love to do even in the absence of reproductive benefit. When two humans have courted for a sufficient duration they are encouraged to throw a ‘wedding’, providing an opportunity for their friends and families to engage in the above activities as well. Then they get tax breaks.

The main prerequisite for enjoying sex and tax breaks is ‘flirting’ — having a friendly conversation while being less than 100% circumspect about one’s romantic intentions. Some humans have evolved spiny rejections which damage the flirter’s ego but cause no lasting harm to their reproductive tract. Despite the low risk and high reward of flirting, most humans avoid it entirely and would prefer it to be outlawed.

It is widely recognized that dating sucks, yet it is paradoxical. Finding a loving partner is a challenge. But so is achieving anything else worthwhile in life. Money, health, friends, success, and renown all require serious investment and years of hard work. In contrast, a date mainly just asks for your company. Shouldn’t dating at least be a fun challenge compared to the rest?

For normal pursuits, extra challenge implies extra effort. Anyone setting out to get rich or fit or famous acknowledges that it’s going to take work. Anyone who has achieved success will eagerly tell you about the work it took. But when the difficulty of dating is brought up, the implication seems to be: …and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Dating sucks because you’re the wrong age in the wrong body, driving the wrong car to the wrong job. Because all the good ones are taken and the rest are shallow, manipulative, and entitled. Because of your parents, social media, capitalism, porn, Disney, microplastics...

Since you can’t make yourself taller or men more sensitive or plastics bigger, there’s nothing to be done. Nothing except to complain about how dating sucks. Dating discourse is a beast that feeds on complaints, and it’s never sated.

Another paradox: we expect a great love to be transformative, yet approach dating expecting to remain exactly as we are. We fantasize about better apps or cooler parties but refuse to change how we swipe or socialize. We want to find someone who “loves me for who I already am”. We advise people in relationships not to expect their partner to change, and to bristle at any suggestion that they also need to evolve.

“Boss told me I need to get better at this job. Why can’t she just employ me for who I truly am inside?” It sounds absurd when applied to employment, but the comparison itself to dating isn’t absurd. Work should be a mutually beneficial association, a match between what you want for yourself and what you can do for others. Relationships aren’t so different.

Self-transformation isn’t the only thing missing from dating discourse. The discourse is either about you, a fixed individual, or about all of them — all men, all women, all “kids these days”. It’s never about the most important person: the one you’re actually hoping to date. Not the abstract idea of him, but the actual human being who currently exists somewhere and is wistfully thinking how great it would be to date someone like you.

However your personal attributes stack up against the competition, you only need that one person to score them highly. Whatever your frustration is with all the other men, he understands it because he gets you. However much dating sucks for you, it also sucks for her; you can make it better.

Wading into the discourse leaves you stuck. Orienting towards your dream partner moves you forward. Where do people like that spend their time? Go there. What would you recognize in them? Find it. What will they love you for? Show it.

Dating doesn’t happen in the first person, ruminating about yourself. Nor in the third person — worrying about how you’re seen by others. It’s all about the second person.

Great Things to Come

This is the point where most dating literature is satisfied with its analysis and turns to instruction. It may offer a playbook of techniques, a catalog of bad habits to quash, a list of positive traits to cultivate. Or it may tell you to just be yourself and have fun. It may ask you to list in detail your requirements for a partner. Or it may encourage you to encounter them as a person and not as a checklist. It’s good advice, most of it.

But… you’ve already heard it before, even if not in these exact words. And so did everyone else. So why do so few people truly follow this advice? Why is it rare to see people take ownership and transform themselves in pursuit of a clear romantic vision? Why is there so much discourse, so many bed bugs, so little agency in dating?

This is where this account starts, not with an answer but with the question: if people want relationships, why do they do so little about it? Why do we present our dating lives as having a single, clear goal, yet behave as if we’re ambivalent and conflicted? What are we hiding from ourselves?

This broad question has fascinated scientists, philosophers, therapists, writers, and millions of Redditors. I don’t know if their answers can all be synthesized, let alone reconciled. No matter, we’ll borrow from all of them and see where curiosity takes us. Hopefully, it could take us towards a glimpse of something important that was hidden from ourselves.

I started writing about dating a decade ago on an unassuming blog dedicated to math nerdery. I started in large part because my own favorite writers wrote about psychology and society and economics and spirituality — but rarely about dating. How could one be interested in humanity and ignore one of the most fascinating things humans do together?

The dating posts quickly became popular. Readers asked for more. They reached out to ask for advice, even demanding to hire me as a dating coach despite my protestations that I lack any coaching qualification. They recounted their own dating stories by the hundreds, their struggles and triumphs, hard lessons, and harder questions. The more I wrote, the more I heard from people, and the more I heard, the more I was inspired to write.

The list of dating topics I want to write about was not exhausted but only grew with time. To do them all justice, I need to leave the old math blog, quit my day job, and write full time.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll read in Second Person:

• What does relationship science actually study?

• How a popular self-improvement book helps you improve absolutely nothing

• Why love is a motivation, not a sensation

• Who dating discourse is for, and who it is against

• A Straussian viewing of Barbie

• Inceldom as identity-preservation on the cliff edge of status

• My friends who got married from Twitter and the one who didn’t and what it has to do with height filters on Bumble

• Why very hot people end up in miserable relationships (with other very hot people)

• The promised fantasy and economic reality of dating apps

• How the incorrect story of how I chose my wife went viral on the internet

• Where all the good men have gone to hang out together

• Matchmaking in the age of superintelligence

• The differences that make or break a couple

• Yes, you can fix them

This was initially planned to be a book, but as I started drafting it that format felt too constraining. Second Person is the director’s cut of the book I wanted to write, as I wanted to write it — not streamlined and simplified for a lower context audience. And it will have a ton of extras that could never fit in a hardcover: book reviews, reactions to insane online discourse, interviews, advice columns, and more.

And finally, like dating itself, writing about relationships shouldn’t be done in isolation. This is an interactive affair. But it isn’t a one-night stand — I’m looking for committed partners. While most extras will be free, most mainline posts that build on each other and develop the core ideas of Second Person will be for subscribers only.

Perhaps you and I have had a long relationship from Putanumonit or Twitter. If so, please consider becoming a founding member: to express gratitude, for the secret perk to be announced later, and because you know this is gonna be good. I will raise the subscription fee when more posts are published, so early subscribers get a discount.

Perhaps this is our first date — welcome! I hope you’ve enjoyed the opening banter. Buy us a coffee and settle in.

Please share your side as well: in comments, DMs, or by email. Send me your dating stories, share your frustrations, pose your questions. Or ask me out if you want to acquire more stories, frustrations, and questions. This can be the beginning of a great relationship.