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kleinbl00  ·  2899 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 11, 2016

It is not and I will tell you why.

When I was your age I walked around in a Schott Perfecto airbrushed with a Skinny Puppy logo on it. I had holes in my ears spaced to fit electronics components. I had a chinese assault rifle in my dorm room and at least three designs for at least three morbidly embarrassing tattoos that I fortunately never went through with.

When my wife was your age she had hair down to her ass and was an avid chamber music performer. Her principle interests were Renfair and needlepoint and she wore a college sweatshirt everywhere. She had never eaten sushi, considered butterscotch schnapps to be her cocktail of choice and rebelled against her parents by attending - gasp! - EndFest. Yet we hung out, were friends, and flirted. She met two of my extremely spooky girlfriends and I was friends with the potato she dated, and then married.

But we got along pretty goddamn well. My wife is fond of saying "we weren't ready for each other back then."

"Opposites attract" is most likely the single most common romance trope. I'd look it up but I'm in a hurry (and there's enough biochemists on this site to fact-check me faster than I can say "o-chem") but I've heard from several different places that the pheromones we're attracted to come from people with moderate genetic drift from ourselves. Biologically, we're looking for diversity, but also compatibility.

The science of attraction is far from settled. Both Match.com and eHarmony.com use variations of Meyers-Briggs in their questionnaires; the funny thing is that Match.com pairs opposites while eHarmony pairs equals. This is probably why eHarmony was favored by older people while Match was favored by younger - our personalities and behaviors when we're young are more malleable.

Far more importantly, however, is research conducted by Dan Ariely that determined that speed dating is far better at finding a lasting companion than any sort of online questionnaire, and that speed dating with shared experience trumps everything. Simply putting two people on computers and making them look at abstract shapes with a chat window does a better job of finding partners than swiping right. It's not about who we are, it's not about what we want, it's about how we interact with each other.

You have to be certain in yourself before you can be confident in your interactions. This, I believe, is why young people flailing about looking for identity have a hard time at romance while the self-assured pricks who know precisely who they are tend to clean up.

Who you are matters fuckall. How you share it is everything.