[…] people’s [dating] advice and complaints primarily reflect, not great truths about love and dating and gender relations, but their own idiosyncratic way of moving through the world. So even in the best cases, where no one is making up emotionally satisfying daydreams, dating discourse winds up consisting of people lobbing anecdotes back and forth at each other, each person accurately representing their own lives.

Very straightforward post. I think everything here is reflective of all “chosen” human relationships, especially friendships.

what universal human experiences are you missing?

By peddling the illusion that romance can be made queer, heteronormative capitalism forces queer people to try solve their problems of undesirability and unhappiness privately by finding the “right” partner, rather than directing their anger towards public action.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zomXm7O3Os

Mikaze Takamiya is a proud high school girl who wants to be cool and perfect. However, her childhood friend, Naoko Wato, constantly throws her off balance. One afternoon after school, Mikaze is forcibly dragged to Naoko’s house and ends up playing a retro game. At first, they play cooperatively, but…!?A high school girls × retro games comedy packed with classic retro game tropes!

Would love to read this one day.

Great video on amatonormativity and the loneliness of masculinity.

An investigation

The “sweater curse” or “curse of the love sweater” is a term used by knitters and crocheters to describe the belief that if a knitter or crocheter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter.

and there’s a lot of monogcycle accidents

Sometimes people say, “obviously, everyone would like to be polyamorous themselves and get to have sex with anyone they want, while their partners are all monogamous and only have sex with them. That way, you get sexual variety and don’t have to feel any jealousy.” I think this is completely false.

From a polyamorous person

Falling in love with a fictional character is not abnormal. Neither by societal standards based on just how many people do and by psychological standards. It is a normal thing we sometimes do as humans; become attached to someone who doesn’t really exist. Let’s take a journey into the mountain of psychological research and real life pandemonium of fictophilia.

sometimes i wish i wasnt aroace but not because i actually want to date anyone its just because the structure of society makes it rly hard to be single😭

Elise Schuenke comics about Sage, an exhausted hard working autistic, home from a long day of work, masking and social effort. Decompressing and pulling back from the effort to perform, we get to see a 5 pager comic of their partners reactions. A wonderful comic that highlights and gives a moment for a powerfully intimate moment that’s easy to misunderstand.

The modeling of polycule dynamics is an open question, but it can be best approximated from the Erdős–Rényi model of the random graph.

You have to balance the risk of accidentally sexually harassing someone against the benefits of asking people out—to you and to the people that you’re asking out. Most of the time, the benefits are larger.

Equal parts hilarious and quite serious. Applicable even for me, an aroallo. Will save this for grad school.

I would like to believe there is something purposeful, resistant, even radical in the heterofatalist mode, but the more I voice it, the more I am inclined to agree with Seresin that it can produce nothing but more of itself. “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem,” he writes. “It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution.” It isn’t that my friend needs to find “some other way to live”; it’s that we all do. But instead of looking for it, we disaffected women “perform” for one another this mutually enabling kind of maintenance, periodically off-gassing some of the shame and frustration of dating men and then chugging along with the status quo.

At first I thought was going to be some pseudo-feminist drivel. but then it turned out to be quite honest and vulnerable. In a sense, it does a good job of summarizing much of what I learned about gender in 2025. Introduces the concept of “heterofatalism.”

Everything shared is fair, but maybe instead it would be better for this kind of guy to not get married and find an aligned sex partner. I dunno. Like, it kinda feels like author’s saying men should intentionally develop an attraction to their partners, and that seems a little LessWrong-y to me. Also feel a connection to Doyle, “Wife Guy.”

One commenter, @jessumsica, puts it best:

There are men who like women and men who like to fuck women. You’ve got to find the middle of the Venn diagram.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/three-cheers-for-the-tomboy-chaser

It’s easier to “de-center” men if you don’t want to have sex with them

More notes on heterofatalism, a la Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men.”

Great comment from @polytropos365182:

Being in love, or even just being “down bad” for somebody, is a really vulnerable— and in many cases, humiliating— emotional experience. I think that often, resenting the gender that you’re attracted to, with or without an ideological rationalization, is a defense mechanism driven by fear of that vulnerability, or a way to palliate the psychic wound of humiliation. The really tough thing is that (as any gay person could tell you), things like rejection, getting dumped, infidelity, etc are personal, not structural. You won’t escape them by abolishing the patriarchy or leveling the longhouse.