Welcome to Second Person
Table of contents and FAQ for new readers.
What is this?
Second Person is a blog about dating and romantic relationships, and why we find them so difficult. But seriously: why?
My aim here is to get truly curious about the question, not to offer easy fixes. To understand what it is about us and the world we live in that can make dating feel intractable. And how, through this understanding, everyone can chart their own path to the relationship they dream of.
Second Person follows the thematic outline of a book, albeit with many digressions. The table of contents organizes all the posts written so far by theme. Below that is a mini-FAQ to orient new readers.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy your time here.
Table of Contents
Each post is written to stand on its own; start with any that seem most intriguing. If you do decide to subscribe and read the entire archive, I would recommend doing so in the chapter order presented here.
The listed outline for future parts is to whet your appetite, there will certainly be much more by the time we get there.
Introduction
Introducing: Second Person, a welcome post introducing the main conundrum: if people think dating sucks, why don’t they do anything about it?
Part I: Let go of what holds you back
Chapter 1: Not like other books
Not a Dating Cookbook — the gap between general dateability advice and your personal dating life.
Love is Love, Science is Fake — why science provides so little insight into romance.
Review: How to Not Die Alone — who are dating advice bestsellers for?
Writing that Changes — not by instructing, but by clearing the path to doing.
Chapter 2: The opposite of resentment
Discourse Against Dating — why dating discourse is so dead set against dating.
Markets in Dating — understanding the logic of markets, and turning complaints into opportunities.
Opposite and Equal — the elusive symmetry of each sex’s complaints about the other.
Black Ops 4B — remember when some women threatened a sex strike after the 2024 election? It lasted just long enough for me to make fun of it.
The Opposite of Resentment — why resentment is utterly inimical to relationships, and a way out for those stuck in it.
Pods and Ends — a roundup of some podcast appearances and addenda to the first 10 posts.
Interlude: On Femininity
Everything Is about Sex, Femininity Is about Power — It's a performance of peril and prestige, and everyone's watching.
Hiding the Female — coming soon!
Barbie in the Longhouse — coming soon!
Chapter 3: We date in a society
Your private dating life is everyone’s business, and today that’s more harmful than helpful.
Chapter 4: Identity trap
Your story about who you are is an obstacle to connecting with others.
Part II: Follow your dream date
Chapter 5: Learning to want
Your Personal Guide to Authentic Wanting — a quick summary of the difficulty of wanting and a personalized exercise for paid subscribers.
Jacob’s Authentic Wanting — dogfooding my own exercise to sketch out the lover I’m looking for.
Future posts in this chapter: on mimetic desire, the safety of not-wanting, goal factoring, the lack.
Chapter 6: Be yourself and have fun
How to Improve at Flirting When You Don’t Like Flirting — flirting can be anything, so anything you enjoy is a place to start practicing.
Chapter 7: Everything is selection
The game is narrowing down the whole world to one person, and everything you do is a move.
Chapter 8: The app death spiral
The fault, dear daters, is not in our apps but in ourselves
Chapter 9: Running the numbers
Micromarriages, market valuations, Nash equilibria, ratios, hotness scales, and the misunderstood spreadsheet.
Chapter 10: OmegaCupid
What if a superintelligence observed your life to match you with a perfect partner?
Part III: Becoming a relationship
How two individuals transform into a couple: the differences that break and build relationships, safety and vulnerability, you can fix them.
Occasionally Asked Questions
I’m not single. Should I be reading this?
First off, congratulations! Best wishes from my family to yours.
A core tenet of mine is that people’s dating struggles are their everything struggles. It’s about insecurity and agency and identity and balancing your raw authenticity with social presentability. If you’re curious about how people are, you will be curious about how they date. And, hopefully, that’s why you’ll find this blog engaging.
Why “Second Person”?
We are often self-focused when thinking about dating. Why is it hard for me? What does it say about me? What’s my dating story? The actual people we’re hoping to date can become a vague them, their entire gender or generation.
I hope to shift your view to the second person, the one you’re hoping to meet. The clearer you can see them and understand their own dating struggles, the easier it is to find them and to love them.
What do I get for subscribing?
Roughly every other post is (and will stay) paywalled. If you enjoyed the free posts and want more, that’s the main reason. The subscription price will go up as I accumulate a larger archive, so grab the yearly price if this blog is your jam.
I will also have special opportunities for subscribers/founding members to get one-on-one feedback, like the authentic wanting exercise and follow-ups.
Was this supposed to be a book?
Yes. A streamlined and simplified version of Second Person will be a book one day, sans the extras and the digressions and the weirdness and the actual interaction with readers. This is the director’s cut.
But: this doesn’t mean that Second Person has an expiration date. I have been blogging about dating for a decade, and I have more topic in my draft folder than when I started.
Is this about polyamory?
They say you shouldn’t listen to dating takes from married people since they’re out of the game, and definitely not from singles since they suck at the game. So who’s left? Well, I am married and occasionally dating — all for the love of the game.
However, Second Person has little to do with ethical non-monogamy. Most people I observe, learn from, and try to help are seeking heterosexual monogamous relationships so that’s the default in my writing.
What about homosexual/queer relationships?
I write about what I know, and that is the relationships between men and women. Insofar as it generalizes to very different configurations of sex, gender, and attraction, I hope all my readers will enjoy it. Insofar as it doesn’t, I trust my readers with more first-hand experience to do a better job of translating this to their own lives than I could.
Where can I read more of your stuff?
I’m mostly active on Twitter if you want to see me workshop Second Person ideas in their rawest form. I also have 8 years’ worth of blogging on Putanumonit, including posts about rationality, money, social science being a total joke, and, of course, dating.
I have another question/comment/complaint/funny dating story that is definitely about a friend and not myself
I look forward to hearing from you in the chat!