dating fallacy
the fantasy of the perfect partner
Despite what wedding vows, social media, and rom-coms will have us believe, there’s no such thing as the perfect partner. Every person is “spiky” in their own way, to borrow a term from Molly Mielke McCarthy. What functions as their greatest strength doubles as their greatest weakness. On an episode of Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast, she talks about it in the context of investing in founders: “I’m trying to understand their core competency, almost like the dominant leg they lead with, and how that makes their other leg weaker.” But it’s equally useful for assessing any kind of partnership potential.
For example, I’m extremely driven and self-motivated (dominant leg), and I can also be very impatient (weaker leg). My partner, on the other hand, has much greater reserves of patience and is more amenable than I am. In a three-legged race, we may still come out okay. If he were equally impatient or bullheaded, there would be no checks on each other’s energies. In stable relationships, your partner’s spikiness would ideally complement your own.
The hardest thing about dating is learning to see people clearly. It requires you to first see yourself clearly, how your biases and desires color your perspective. It’s easy to become enamored with an aspect of a person and blow it up into a grand idea of who they are. There’s a quote attributed to Marcel Proust that goes, “it is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
Sometimes, what we fall in love with is not a person but a vision of who we want to be. In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain tells the story of entering an all-consuming relationship with a musician shortly after leaving her law career. After it ended, a friend helped her see that what she was actually longing for was the lyricism and world of words he represented. I had an uncannily similar experience when I briefly dated a guy with literary sensibilities. The first thing I noticed when I walked into his West Village apartment was the bookshelf. There was Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor (a deep cut) and Peter Hessler’s River Town (a chronicle of the author’s time as a Peace Corps teacher in Sichuan, the province of China where my family’s from). I imagined him sitting on his roof, sipping an espresso, reading, while the neighborhood, steeped in bohemian history, hummed around him. One time, lying in bed, he read to me from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. I thought it was the most romantic thing.
He represented a desire that was yet unfulfilled, an idea of a “literary life.” At the time, I’d been working on a novel, but I had no writing community. On a trip to Portugal, I confronted the painful truth I already knew deep down that he wasn’t serious about me. I will admit that I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand him, as if he were a Henry James character I could analyze and distill into a five-paragraph essay. What was more fruitful was turning that critical eye inward. When I came home, I wrote about heartbreak, the first post on this Substack. I started putting my ideas on the internet, which I hadn’t done since the days of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writing publicly helped me find likeminded people on Twitter. I met them IRL, and they introduced me to other writers and creatives. In reclaiming my desire for a literary life, I was able to let go of my fantasy of him. Sometimes, the wrong person walks into our life for the right reason.
A year and a half later, he reached out after stumbling upon my Substack (my tweets were popping up in his feed). He correctly surmised that the dating piece was informed by my experience with him. I hadn’t been looking for closure, but somehow, through my writing, it found me.
One of the most misleading ideas in dating is that there exists a “right person” for you. I think you can have many meaningful intimate relationships, and if you’re monogamous, then you are simply selecting one person to build a life with. Some might genuinely believe their partner is “the one,” but you don’t need that kind of conviction in order to feel happy and fulfilled. Dating has no end game. We can’t optimize our choice of a partner.
Unfortunately, social media trains our brains to keep filtering for unrealistic specifications. To feel envied is to feel powerful is Instagram’s implicit motto. By feeding us images of people living their best lives, it creates the illusion that everyone’s relationship is more beautiful, nurturing, exciting, and adventurous than our own. The comparison worms its way into our brains, making us tetchier the next time our partner does something that annoys us.
In her 2023 essay “women see in third person,” Molly wrote:
Women are simply much more inclined to strategies that guarantee safety than men. Which is all great and good until you realize how far these strategies distance you from your desires. See, that’s the catch about living life in third person: it makes it very hard to know, much less act on, what you want. [...] Living life in the third person means the possibility space of things I allow myself to say and feel are constrained to the aesthetics of how I want to be perceived.
When we curate pictures of our life on Instagram, we’re effectively narrating in the third person. I believe it is possible to share what genuinely excites us without performing for an audience. But it takes intentionality and inner attunement, and love, which is by nature an act of imagination, is particularly susceptible to the trappings of fantasy on our screens.
What I’m enjoying
I’m late to Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast, and I’m really enjoying the expansive conversations with Nix, Henrik Karlsson, and Celine Nguyen, among others.
I love this post from my dear friend Carolyn Yoo about “going quietly public on the internet,” the first in a series about sharing online without performing. In these noisy times, this is much needed.
Lots of people have lots of barbed opinions about the tradwife influencer novel Yesteryear by caro claire burke. Some of it is fair; some of it is, dare I say, envy? I certainly wish I’d written it. There’s a reflexive instinct in our culture to criticize a work of art because it makes us sound smarter. But the books I enjoy the most and can’t stop thinking about are the ones that are doing something interesting and raising provocative questions. Yesteryear certainly rises to the challenge (I’m not going to make a sourdough joke).
thank you for writing, had a great time reading. Have been enjoying the Dialectic too.