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Delaney Huesgen's avatar

I think this was one of the best things I've read in MONTHS - thank you <3

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

Thank you! I felt so incredible awkward publishing it - though writing it was a blast. I think this piece taught me a bunch of deep lessons about writing. Fun to see where that goes.

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Delaney Huesgen's avatar

All the awkward ones always get the best response. Vulnerability is COOL!

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Jesse's avatar

Can I second this?

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John Hansbrough's avatar

I loved this and especially the 3 ideals around communication: 20k hours, comfort in talking through hard and painful decisions, and conversation that is "wildly generative."

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

so we're like 6k hours in or so - but goddamn is it wild

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Nich's avatar

Such a beautiful thought but also terrifying for me (and i imagine? Expect? Hope? others).

I've never met a perhaps that i could see fulfilling all 3.

Past relationships have had 2/3. Perhaps that's enough for most of us. And that's ok.

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

Conversation is a skill, too. Me and Johanna has spent a lot of time thinking about how to get better at it. So we had like 2/3 first, and now have all 3 and are better at all parts of it.

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Nich's avatar

Excellent point. And if you have 2/3, you likely are compatible enough communicators to make the third happen

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Joseph Walmsley's avatar

Conversation that are wildly generative is something I never knew I benefited from. But looking back through my relationships over the years, all the ones that have stuck, have been with people like this, people who's conversation I adore, and learn from. So true. Dang. Your a genius.

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Adam Zerner's avatar

> But I do think it is a good idea, generally, and one that I have used—to speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts. 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).

I think about this as being similar to how with a startup, you want to fail fast.

> 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

This reminds me of something. Growing up, I didn't "believe in intuition". Well, I guess what I mean is that I didn't believe it was sufficient evidence. Like if I had an instinct that X would happen but wasn't able to logically describe why I think X would happen, I'd say "Forget it, I can't justify this belief, I don't think X will happen."

But then I discovered neuroscience. I read this book and it talked about how there _is_ logic behind the intuition. Your brain does a whole bunch of information processing before it spits out an intuition as an output. It isn't "just a feeling". It's just that the logic isn't legible to you; it happens subconsciously.

And then later on I discovered Bayes and realized that it doesn't even matter whether there is logic behind the intuition. If X is true, how likely would I have this intuition? If X is not true, how often would I have it? As long as the answer to the first is greater than the answer to the second, it counts as evidence. Period. As Scott Alexander says: "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary."

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

Yes, I agree with both points. Failing fast. And also, its about building up the ability to pattern match. I get a lot of emails about this piece from people who recruit top talent because they feel this is pretty much what they are doing.

(By the way, I saw your comments on LW and liked them (agree that the first piece I did two years ago overreaches a bit, though that framework has been very useful for me). I'm too busy to reply on LW atm.)

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Pari's avatar

What book was the neuroscience one?

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Adam Zerner's avatar

Ah cool, that makes sense about recruiters. No worries on LW and being busy.

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Liv's avatar

what was the neuroscience book? Love this framing of intuition also!

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Vickram Pradhan's avatar

"It's just that the logic isn't legible to you" love this thought, Adam. Thanks for sharing.

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shani's avatar

Thank you Henrik. this was wonderful to read. Favorite lines:

"the someone else was kind and deep and worth a lifetime"

"show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there."

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Isabella Grandic's avatar

love the second one a lot! I also think we ought to ask ourselves how we can love the inside of our heads too

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

oh, I like that

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Damian Cannon's avatar

OK wow this is a super essay. Thanks for getting your thoughts down on paper. I very much agree that if you can expose your innermost thoughts to someone and have them accept them without judgement then they're a keeper. This works for friends as well as lovers. In fact with friends you benefit from the fact that you don't have to provide unconditional love which can muddy the waters when you're looking for raw honesty.

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Isabella Grandic's avatar

Keep coming back to this. Stunning. Going to continue exploring my inner space and being vulnerable -- generative is a great criteria.

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Alex Higgs's avatar

This was wise and thoughtful - thank you for writing it.

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Eric Westerlind's avatar

Excellent, Henrik.

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Jessie Epstein's avatar

Truly exceptional. Thank you for sharing your interior landscape.

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Caye Borreo's avatar

Such a GOOD read. I feel I’ve done a good job over forming friendships with interiorities similar to mine, but dating... is much trickier 😅

PS. Would love to hear a retelling but from Johanna’s perspective!

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Leah's avatar

Yes we neeeeed Joanna's perspective !!!

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Adaobi's avatar

this was such a great essay!

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Hattie Morrison's avatar

This completely shook the words in my head into a scramble and for the first time, I liked how that felt

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Lovleen Kaur's avatar

This was AMAZING! What an engaging read <3

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im.meh's avatar

This was just ... beautiful! Thank you!

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Nora Poggi's avatar

Thank you! I feel like something we need to also talk about is the timing and luck of this mutual desire to explore the fusion beyond the excitement it first creates. I have felt this way about a few people and often they were not available to genuinely commit - there's an elusive mutuality and magic of timing to 'finding Alice' that one cannot control... What are the chances that one will find a way after 18 months of pining? Happy this worked out for you, and thank you for sharing.

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Henrik Karlsson's avatar

So I'm extremely lucky. In many ways. But if there is some sort of mutual energy there, I think it is worth pining for however long (as long as it does not block you from finding others and building relationships etc). I have a friend who spent five years pining - he was in his mid-fifties, and his now wife, too. But she was married and he didn't want to bother that so he just hung out with her and waited for the right time. Another, the daughter of a friend, met a guy when a group of friends had a dinner club. All the other ppl dropped off over the years. But they kept eating dinner once a week, and because of various psychological inhibitions, it took them twenty-five years before both were ready to admit they loved each other.

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Denny's avatar

Oh, the thought of these people make me want to cry.

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