The vision I’ve set out for myself is – can you trust yourself to take care of your problems as needed, and also to reach out for help to the extent that it’s needed too? I’ve found that by virtue of this increased security I also find it easier to reach out when I actually feel like I need help. In the past I would often just “struggle in silence” and secretly hope for my friends to check in on me, and then develop resentment when they didn’t. I was continually reinforcing this self-story of “I have so much difficulty with basic things and no one understands.”

When you treat friendship—or anything else, really—as a crutch for an underlying insecurity you are doomed to be unsatisfied. No number of crutches will get you back to walking again.

Some people are great at giving gifts. The kinds of gifts that dig into your soul and make you feel seen. I'm trying to become one of those people

Simon conspired with a friend who owns a 3D printer and designed and created a little desktop bear that can hold all of the nice things people have written about Bear. He then wrote each of these entries by hand (suffering only minor carpel tunnel) on sticky notes which the bear now carries like a human bear directional.

These are the kinds of gifts I want to learn how to give. Ones that make the receiver feel like they've been listened to and understood. That don't cost much money but are priceless at the same time.

I think she enjoys treating her boyfriend like a chore because her relationship with her parents acclimated her to the feeling of being depended on. She likes the feeling of parenting and babying someone because her child-self had to do that to stay on her parents’ good side. In other words, her psyche felt like, in order to keep her parents’ love and protection, she needed to turn herself into a caretaker, going above and beyond what she knows she should be doing.

Patterns that are formed out of necessity in an earlier stage of life determine what you look for for the rest of your life. The behaviors you were forced to do when you were younger become the behaviors you itch to do when you’re older.

Like making a tie-dye T-shirt, the twists and turns of childhood shape the way we’re colored as adults.

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.

The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.

The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy

Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.

A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?

Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.

The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.

The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.

you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.

Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.

Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.

Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.

Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.

the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of directing compassion at things, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.

someone saying no to you is your opportunity to show yourself who you really are. Because it strains your capacity, in the moment, to feel love. The moment when you hear sorry I'm booked the whole weekend once again when calling a friend about dinner plans. When you learn an old friend is in town and hasn’t reached out to see you. When you notice that your best friend is prioritizing their developing relationship to the detriment of your friendship.

The trouble with wisdom is that it's easy to forget. In my more sober moments I'm fully aware that we're all manifestations of the same thing, that however many followers or expensive things or famous friends you have, you are nothing more than a frail primate in a decaying body. I know that climbing any of these ladders brings a fleeting and unsatisfying happiness. But in the moment that someone says no, in the moment that someone I admire fails to show up when they had promised to, the world morphs back into something I know it isn't: this individuated, transactional competition. This zero-sum game that promises that if I just got a bit further ahead I’d be content and never feel bad about myself again.

If you are using emotionally independent language, it may trigger some insecurities in the other person who may think that you aren’t as interested or invested in the relationship. It may be helpful to let the other person know that you are working on your emotional reactivity and trying out new approaches, to help minimize the potential perceived threat on their end.

Becoming emotionally independent can be a challenging journey, although there are numerous potential benefits to reclaiming your own needs and desires and decreasing your emotional reactivity to other people (i.e., managing your own insecurities or unproductive relationship expectations).