I hope it happens for you

I want to fall in love again, but this time I want to do it once for the rest of my life with the right person. “Speak now or forever hold your peace” kinda thing. There are very few things that fascinate me as much as the idea of people falling in love. This mystery has perplexed me for most of my 20s. I wish I had an easy answer but since I’m not selling you a course, I might as well admit I’m lost and share my confusion with you.

If you asked me what made me love each person in my life, I wouldn’t have a good answer. I can never chalk it up to a fixed set of traits because its not that easy. Sometimes it was the love of art, sometimes it was the love of skiing and sometimes it was just being stuck together in a horrible situation. I never saw it coming, one day I just woke up thinking this person’s so fucking cool, and I have no idea how it happened but I’m glad it did.

I want to find “My person”, I really want to. I was looking so hard that it actually made it harder to find. I was trying too hard. I figured that if I could take myself out of it the fear, the anxiety, the rush, the yearning might make it easier. As I write this, I see how unfair it is to put so much burden on another person, the burden of all your hidden desires and yearning. But somehow the twisted machinery of your psyche and your angst can do wonders on you. I accidentally stumbled upon a post from one of my favorite authors, Ava from BookBear Express:

BookBear Express has been one of my favorite blogs for many years. The ideas from it have helped me tremendously in my relationships and how I lived and how I met people with grace and love. I also think that it taught me a lot of self-compassion and made me slightly more self-adjusted both romantically and career-wise in other ways. The purpose of this event was to find a ton of readers of BookBear Express and then try to pair them with each other. Hopefully some of them get married, and I get invited to a wedding.

So I just DM’d her to become a self-appointed tech support for this. To make this event more fun, our idea was to gather a lot of data from people. We asked everyone 26 questions to figure out who they were, what their preferences were, and then do a very comprehensive analysis of figuring out the kind of person they are. We gathered roughly 105 people and 80 of them showed up to the event which was incredible. We had cards built out for all of them

The cards looked like this(name changed). The idea was that everyone was going to be matched with: Two people they really liked and were highly compatible with One person they were least compatible with We were now going to tell you which is which.

The truth is, what people say they want and what they actually want are very different things. Matchmaking, like everything else here, is a little bit of math and a lot of magic. By keeping this element of surprise, we added that magic. I think people come to these events and see someone they like and immediately feel this anxiety: Will this person like me? Do I want to take the leap of approaching them? What if they say no? And if they do, am I an incessant botherer doomed to a lifetime of loneliness? duhhhhh… maybe I should check my phone for the 5th time.

The whole point of making these cards was to make that anxiety go away. To give people a valid excuse to approach someone they liked, so the magic of introduction could finally happen. The math behind all these cards is in another blog post for nerds. This one is just about philosophy. Right before the event, a friend of mine(Mrs X) said, ‘What you’re doing is nothing serious; it’s only my life that’s in your hands.’ I know she said it as a joke, but at that moment, it hit me that a few lines of code I’ve written could potentially decide the course of someone’s lifetime.

There’s a deep part of me that believes that at least a few people in the matchmaking event could end up dating, and I really hope that it does happen. It will make me very happy, and more importantly, two people with a similar background who are enamored by similar ideas get to be together. What could be more beautiful than this?

At the same time, it hit me that so many people in this discourse of matchmaking have perverse incentives. Every single day, yet another dating app just wants you to pay more to keep coming back. They have very little interest in you actually getting married. I made a vow to get nothing out of it, that’s the only way this could ever really work. I want to do it right.

A few magical things that happened:

• Mrs X met Mr H(another guy we know) matched with each other. I knew both of them and they know each other. The sheer surprise of this boggles my brain. We live in a small world.
• A guy got there late, so he couldn’t pick his card in time. Later, when I showed him matches with the card of his name, one match was actually his friend and she was hanging out with him the whole time.

I really hope that everyone had a good time. Overall the intent of this event was to get the room “popping” just get people to talk to each feel their “vibes” and then people get each other’s numbers and hopefully they talk and feel some spark. You can’t really have a heart to heart conversation in a long event like this, there’s too many people around you, there’s so much pressure, there’s so much yearning and pent up trauma when the intent is so clear. How much of you should you expose to this stranger? How much is too much and how much is too little? Am I too proud by holding back or too desperate by showing all my cards?

We encourage people to spend 10-15 minutes “feeling it out”. Just have a conversation, say a hello to your “match” person: say what you like, what excites you. You both read this blog on love and relationships, its not the most eccentric niche in the world but it is like a twisted 4d space where the more you try to go in the further you go out. Where you are in this 4d space doesn’t matter as much as your intention of where you want to go. Perhaps the person you matched with also wants to go “there” and hopefully with you.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s be nimble, why don’t you just exchange numbers/insta/snap(uggh genZ)? You are both nice to each other(you kinda have to be) some of your friends are here(And Ava who you love very much). You go home, and get something to eat, your mind comes out of this strange social “rush” feeling, you want it to quiet down. Maybe then you “look each other up”, maybe you like what you see, maybe you want to know more and maybe just maybe, you like them enough that you want more of this person. I hope it happens for you, I really do.