Correspondent: John Wentworth, a man I have been on two dates with. We were not already close before that. I think I’ve spent around 20 hours interacting with him in person or on video calls, and we’ve texted a moderate amount in between.
Date: Right now. I am sending him this letter by posting it to my blog. He did not see it in advance, though when he saw yesterday’s letter he probably guessed about what was coming.
#include <love.h> // <-- read this first! it defines "love"The first time I felt the impulse to tell you I loved you was sometime between our first and second dates. You were sending me extremely hot texts regarding your plans for me on our second date. That, by itself, wouldn’t have done it.
No, what did it is that we became collaborators, co-conspirators, in creating something tailored to the two of us. You led — we started from your extremely vivid erotic fantasies of what could happen. But I poured my reactions back, in great detail, and you took the data I gave you and incorporated it and revised your plan. You put in the work to see me clearly and to adjust.
You looked for points of tension, places where I was asking myself, “Do I really dare…?” You found the ideas that were outside my comfort zone, but barely within my reach, and there you staked your claim. Whatever outrageous thing I could screw up my courage to contemplate, you pinned it down and you said, “Yes. This.”
Never in my life have I been so amped up for a date. Never have I been so terrified for a date. The morning of the date, I texted to check if, perhaps, you were not quite over a previous illness and you wanted to cancel…? “No such luck,” you said firmly.
Walking, trembling, into that second date, I had still only spent about five hours in real-time interaction with you. And while the texts had been hot, they had not been numerous. We didn’t have long, synchronous chats. We fired erotic darts at each other at a slow pace. But something had already shifted. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped thinking of you as a fuck buddy and started to think of you as a source of creative, agentic life force — and even better, as someone who wanted to build experiences with me, for our mutual benefit.
I’d stopped thinking of you as someone I’d let dominate me in bed, and started to think of you as someone who was actually capable of a more real and solid kind of leadership. That’s pretty rare for me. I tend to dominate most rooms and most situations, unless I yield on purpose. I don’t meet many people with enough ideas, drive, executive function, and energy that they can truly lead.
So yes, I was terrified about your plans for me, but I was also excited, because you were capable of making those plans exist.
I’m pretty sure that when I showed up for the second date, I already loved you.
That’s the story of how it came about, but it was just a flash of wordless insight at that point. The second date was long — I quadrupled my lifetime hours with you! — and, after I’d survived the erotic terror-gauntlet of the first few hours, we talked. The more we talked, the more sure I got.
I think now I should actually spell it out. Why do I love you?
What follows reads almost like a database printout, a list of records in a table. That’s what I get, when I retrieve the file from my brain. It’s not romantic, it’s not designed to be. I can write you another kind of love letter another time, if you like, one with more squishy feelings and fantasies in it. Anyway, enough excuses, on with it.
You’re unusually easy for me to love, because you (seem to be) so easy to see.
You’re blunt, direct, and unguarded. You don’t seem to have much in the way of circles of trust. You don’t seem to code switch. You’re just the same in every situation. If there’s something you’re willing to say at all, you’re willing to say it in every context.1
Either you don’t mask, or your mask is very good and has fooled me.
The signals you send are very loud and very unusual. You stand out against most backgrounds. I don’t need to sift through subtle shades, looking for the few bits that distinguish you from other people. They’re obvious and unmissable.
Even better, when I look at the data I see, it’s all consistent and coherent, it all paints the same picture. I am sure you contradict yourself sometimes, everyone does, but I haven’t caught you at it so far. You appear to be well-integrated without a lot of inner conflict or infighting, which makes it much easier for me to build a model of you.2
And what do I see? What do I admire?
Quite a lot of what I admire are the same characteristics that make you easy to see!
Being blunt, distinct, and integrated is deeply calming to me. It saves so much time and confusion. I don’t need to puzzle out who you really are in there, it’s just all on display. I feel that I can straightforwardly go about calculating the win/win, I can quickly gain confidence about how to interact with you.
But in addition:
You go hard. I want to say “ruthlessly so,” but when I check whether I believe that, it’s complicated. You have never pushed me too hard. I feel cared for, as you pursue your goals. You’re not reckless. Your force is measured and you are paying attention to the results of your actions and feeding your observations back in. Your control loops are functional.
This is, in the end, the same thing as going hard — this is what it looks like to go hard on maximizing a function with more than one term. I guess I just wanted to head off any potential misunderstandings people might have about you moving implacably towards a selfish goal. That’s not what I see. It’s more subtle than that.
You’re inventive. You put energy and creativity into making memorable and intense experiences for the two of us, and I can tell that you are actually trying, you are not passively waiting around to see what happens to be possible, you are exploring and thinking and generating ideas and making bets.
You’re selfish in a way I can easily work with. You are in charge of yourself and you know that. You protect what you need to protect,3 but when you have resources to give, you are generous with me.4
Your reassurances are uncannily good. You have a knack for noticing what I’m nervous about and squarely addressing it, even when I’m not seeking reassurance at all. I did not expect so much tenderness from you. As you’ve gotten to know me you’ve noticed times that I am struggling with situations having nothing to do with you, and you’ve offered comfort.
Never once have you come across as needy. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is okay for people to be interdependent on each other, especially in relationships that are more than two dates old. Nothing bad will happen if we put in several hundred more hours together and along the way you come to depend on me for certain things and be justifiably disappointed when you don’t get those things.
But a lot of people just radiate need from the very start. It’s leaking out of their pores. They have no idea they’re even doing it.
And I don’t get that from you. You project self-sufficiency. Time will tell how true that actually is, how much of it is a front and how much is solid, but it is a good sign (to me) that things have started this way.
Your apparent self-sufficiency gives me room to get right up close to you and really look at you, without getting scared that I’m going to get sucked into a need-vortex.
The sex and kink are very intense, and getting more erotic.
I have the sense that we’re still finding our groove here. Some people, reading between the lines, might think I meant the sex so far has been disappointing. It has not. I have enjoyed all of it immensely, even the parts I did not enjoy at all because you are a sadist. It has been passionate and varied and has held one hundred percent of my attention at all times, and I am very much looking forward to having more of it. And there was an impressive uptick in eroticism from the first date to the second.
Even given that promising start, I think there’s tremendous upside potential to explore. We don’t actually know each other well yet, and knowing each other — both our bodies and our minds — matters to the quality of the sex. I predict that the sex we’ve had so far will turn out to have been our worst sex. It’s going to get even better from here.
You improve quickly. Your OODA loops are super tight, if you know what I mean.
This is evident all over the place, but especially with sex, an area in which you are extremely motived to invest.
You are very snuggly and demonstrative. When we go to a restaurant, you want to sit on the same bench, touching the whole time. When we’re in the car, your hands keep wandering over. I like the attention, it feels good.
You mesh surprisingly well with my existing life. It’s always a little scary, adding a new person to a polycule. The whole system ripples and then settles into a new shape, and that shape is not always stable or good. I am utterly devoted to my existing primary partner, to my kids, to my other partners. I don’t want to disrupt any of the very good things I have going.
To my pleasant surprise, blending you in has been easy and immediately beneficial. I didn’t expect that. I usually hope for “neutral, no drama, probably a few issues to work on over time.” This has gone far better than that.
You have remained yourself. You haven’t forgotten the things that mattered to you before we met. You have work you care about, projects, other people you are dating, and you haven’t, to my knowledge, dropped any of that.
You’re investing in me, but you didn’t get distracted, you’re still doing all of those things and those people. The space you’ve carved out for me feels appropriately-sized.
This is good. It’s scary when people drop everything and want to hang out 24/7. It implies that their previous life wasn’t worth that much to them, or that their weathervane twists too hard in a light breeze.
I want you to stay solidly yourself, and this is evidence that you know how to do that.
I have probably forgotten some things,5 and I’m sure I’ll discover more, but this is enough. I see these things, I admire them, I feel a strong attraction. I’m there. As I said, I’ve been there for a while.
In the waning hours of the second date, as you petted me gently and asked me what I was thinking, I felt the urge just to blurt it out. I decided not to. I wanted you to have the preamble first. I think you probably could have handled it. I think you probably guessed. You’re smart like that. But I didn’t blurt it, because I care how this goes and I don’t want to make unforced errors. I wanted to explain myself properly.
Now that I’ve explained, the next time I want to say it, I won’t have to hold back. I’m looking forward to that.
Maybe this will go horribly wrong! Maybe I will find out next week that John is literally the worst. That will be embarrassing.
I’ll take the risk.
This is why it felt good and right to be so public with this letter, without even checking first.
This paragraph is one of the lowest confidence parts of my model. People are almost always more tangled up on the inside than you look to me right now, and I’ll be pretty surprised if you’re as integrated as you look. Nevertheless, you make a promising first impression.
Though I have the sense — this is just a guess — that maybe you haven’t always been good at this, and that the skill is still new and wobbly. I have my eye on it.
This is basically my favorite way for things to work. The alternative, “always put your partner ahead of yourself,” can work, for the right kinds of people, but has a very high misery-and-flameout rate.
Like the nethack ascension! How could I forget that?
>>> Look, you don’t have to say the words “I love you,” you can just subscribe. I’ll get the message.
I already subscribed.