looking-for-alice-by-henrik-karlsson-escaping-flatland

✏️ Highlights

I don’t know much about dating. The reason they ask me is that I am a nerd and I am married to Johanna. Johanna is an Alice. That is: she is a singular human being, that I happen to love. She has an insane amount of integrity and a gravity field in her left ear that pulls my words out of orbit.

When I was seventeen, my crushes were random. As if I was an untrained neural network trying to predict which image was a cat.

first time I met Johanna, on September 11, 2011, I was having a poetry reading in a bookstore. I was twenty-two. I figured she was probably there to see me. She was not there to see me. A month later, hungover in a café, we met again.

In the café, we didn’t talk much, but from observing how she talked to her best friend,

I deduced that Johanna was probably an Alice. 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.

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.

You have to never let someone like that pass you by. And this is hard because you should also not be a creep.

when Johanna was getting ready to leave I asked her if we should do _something someday, _which is always a solid suggestion. “Yeah”,

when Johanna was getting ready to leave I asked her if we should do _something someday, _which is always a solid suggestion. “Yeah”, she said smiling.

“I have drunk my phone away, to be honest, but maybe if you take my number?” I said. She did. She did not text me.

I spent the next eighteen months trying very hard to make her feel like I wasn’t obsessed with her, though I stopped to talk with her every time I saw her—in the supermarket, at clubs, in the street. We had a lot of fun; she wasn’t into it.

you should never be a person with stalky behavior. (I wasn’t!)

though she tells me I should make it very clear that patiently waiting around for the possibility that someone might decide to turn your chemistry into something more can easily fall over into stalky behavior

But if the energy is Alice, you should also not drop it.

She was more fascinated by the fact that, unlike all the other twenty-three-year-olds who didn’t know what they were talking about, I wasn’t trying to hide it.

It was, to her, very obvious that I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.

the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

April 2013, we happened to be walking along the same path. We came to the F. river. I lived on one side. Johanna lived on the other. “Where are we going?” I said, trying to sound as much as possible as if I was talking about geography. She nodded slyly with her head toward her block.

A standard joke in my and Johanna’s relationship has been how incredibly unattractive I made myself that night.

Like a character from Dostoevsky, I started talking, not about the girlfriend who I knew I was about to hurt, but about how good it had felt when I met my first girlfriend, and how, after I’d kissed this first girlfriend, I had had to lie down in a slide on a playground, so full of emotion.

Most “dates” would have been hurt by my monologue that night, or bored, or appalled. Johanna’s reaction was more something like: I’ve never met anyone who takes his thoughts so with such loving seriosity, and he’s apparently not at all ashamed of his pain.

There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good).

If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.

I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this. But when I do it with Johanna—especially in the first few years—it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux.

That open conversational space, which is the heart of our relationship, is not something I can explain; it is not something I knew I was looking for; I’m not even the same person after having been there

I remember with a cold sweat that I almost turned Johanna down because I felt confused by my inability to explain what our relationship was and why I liked it; confused by my friend’s lack of excitement, and by their excitement about other, more legible people, that wanted to date me.

I don’t know much about dating. The reason they ask me is that I am a nerd and I am married to Johanna. Johanna is an Alice. That is: she is a singular human being, that I happen to love. She has an insane amount of integrity and a gravity field in her left ear that pulls my words out of orbit.

When I was seventeen, my crushes were random. As if I was an untrained neural network trying to predict which image was a cat.

first time I met Johanna, on September 11, 2011, I was having a poetry reading in a bookstore. I was twenty-two. I figured she was probably there to see me. She was not there to see me. A month later, hungover in a café, we met again.

In the café, we didn’t talk much, but from observing how she talked to her best friend,

I deduced that Johanna was probably an Alice. 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.

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.

You have to never let someone like that pass you by. And this is hard because you should also not be a creep.

when Johanna was getting ready to leave I asked her if we should do _something someday, _which is always a solid suggestion. “Yeah”,

when Johanna was getting ready to leave I asked her if we should do _something someday, _which is always a solid suggestion. “Yeah”, she said smiling.

“I have drunk my phone away, to be honest, but maybe if you take my number?” I said. She did. She did not text me.

I spent the next eighteen months trying very hard to make her feel like I wasn’t obsessed with her, though I stopped to talk with her every time I saw her—in the supermarket, at clubs, in the street. We had a lot of fun; she wasn’t into it.

you should never be a person with stalky behavior. (I wasn’t!)

though she tells me I should make it very clear that patiently waiting around for the possibility that someone might decide to turn your chemistry into something more can easily fall over into stalky behavior

But if the energy is Alice, you should also not drop it.

She was more fascinated by the fact that, unlike all the other twenty-three-year-olds who didn’t know what they were talking about, I wasn’t trying to hide it.

It was, to her, very obvious that I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.

the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

April 2013, we happened to be walking along the same path. We came to the F. river. I lived on one side. Johanna lived on the other. “Where are we going?” I said, trying to sound as much as possible as if I was talking about geography. She nodded slyly with her head toward her block.

A standard joke in my and Johanna’s relationship has been how incredibly unattractive I made myself that night.

Like a character from Dostoevsky, I started talking, not about the girlfriend who I knew I was about to hurt, but about how good it had felt when I met my first girlfriend, and how, after I’d kissed this first girlfriend, I had had to lie down in a slide on a playground, so full of emotion.

Most “dates” would have been hurt by my monologue that night, or bored, or appalled. Johanna’s reaction was more something like: I’ve never met anyone who takes his thoughts so with such loving seriosity, and he’s apparently not at all ashamed of his pain.

There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good).

If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.

I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this. But when I do it with Johanna—especially in the first few years—it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux.

That open conversational space, which is the heart of our relationship, is not something I can explain; it is not something I knew I was looking for; I’m not even the same person after having been there

I remember with a cold sweat that I almost turned Johanna down because I felt confused by my inability to explain what our relationship was and why I liked it; confused by my friend’s lack of excitement, and by their excitement about other, more legible people, that wanted to date me.