A good read on finding a partner (from a 10+ year r/s)

Issue 9

After a long time I loved reading a piece so much I was voraciously reading it, and the next part, and the one after, on my flight. This one’s a treat because this 3-part series is one of the best I’ve read on relationships and finding a partner. Read part 2 because it gets even better.

From Part 1: Looking for Alice by Henrik Karlsson.

You can learn a lot by observing how people hang out with their friends. She laughed like a hyena, and they were obsessing over some obscure book, and they were so raw and cute. I’d never been as intrigued by a human being before.

And the thing is, there aren’t that many people you can have an amazing life with. Maybe 10,000, spread fairly evenly across the globe? A bit more if you’re less weird than me, perhaps. Anyway, the number is small enough that you can’t afford to be casual about it. You have to never let someone like that pass you by.

And this is hard because you should also not be a creep.

From Part 2: Dostoevsky as lover by Henrik Karlsson.

But I sit down anyway. I don’t write because I’m inspired; I write because I care. Being inspired is fun, and I savor the moments when I am. But more often than not, inspiration refuses to show up until I assure it that I can be trusted to stick to my writing schedule. So I make sure that I sit down at my desk every day — by focusing on the thing I can control, I craft a space for inspiration. And if it fails to come, I work anyway. 

This is how I think about love, too. It is a craft.

“If I give this person the loving space where they can express their word for hundreds and then thousands of hours, what will happen then? What will they transform into?”

This, I think, is a healthy way to think about love. It is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion.