Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

You cannot make anyone fall in love with you. That belief that you can, and the hubris that goes with it, leads to twisty and dark places.

Instead,

1. Be the best, and authentic person you can be. Authenticity is not found by looking outside, but rather, connecting deeper within your consciousness. Various forms of meditation allows one to explore this space. This means working through layers of conditioning, expectations, and hangups related to this: beliefs and attitudes about love, beliefs and attitudes about success, what you truly value (rather than what you are conditioned to value), hangups around seeking approval, intimacy, etc. Therapy can be a good way to get help exploring this if you don’t know anyone you can connect with for wisdom.

2. Care for and contribute towards something greater than you. This connects what you discover about yourself in (1) to the world outside of you. When this clicks, it gives a sense of purpose to your life.

3. Give others a chance to know who you are, from (1). This is a relaxing on the psychological armoring surrounding (1). Approach dating as such, as a way two people are discovering each other, rather than aiming for a particular outcome or meeting certain metrics.

Falling in love can be a profound experience. However, I can tell you that being in relation, and relationships involves a lot more than falling in love. Any long-term relationship and life partnership is far more difficult than dating, and the expectations people create around notions of “falling in love” puts unreasonable demands on each other.

The advice I hear from couples who have been married for decades, particularly those from traditional Indian marriages (which are arranged by the parents), is “tolerance”. And it’s going to the little, stupid stuff you tolerate. Sense of humor helps a lot here.

Indian marriages are a sham in my opinion. I would like to respectfully disagree with you. Most Indian marriages do survive because of tolerance but the tolerance arises from the societal pressure and stigma that surrounds separation. I am getting close to a marital age and have been observing Indian couples. I see a pattern where many couples are not happy but are still together because they can tolerate each other. I don't like that. Not everyone is like that but many are and they are okay with it

> Be the best, and authentic person you can be.

Hold on. This can be terrible advice. Suppose the "authentic" you is an asshole, or suppose the "authentic" you refuses to do "standard dating maneuvers" like flirting, that are part of the common language that society expects you to participate in to even get a chance. Then you should abandon authenticity and change those things about yourself, you should put some effort into learning about what is "generally expected".

Like they say, "Be yourself, just a bit better" :)

I think in this context authentic means more of, “don’t do a set of actions to get a specific outcome”, outside of finding a mate.

Example, younger me would go on dates, and try to be the person the other person wanted (without realizing this until later in life).

This kind of inauthentic actions is ultimately untruthful and will cause more problems down the line.

I’m glad you learned not to try to be what you think the other person wants.

What I meant by authenticity goes more than that. It’s gaining an intuitive knowing of who you really are, past the layers of beliefs and conditionings. It’s more that just who you think the person you are dating expects. It is also your parent’s expectations, or even your religious and cultural expectations. It goes past even what you _think_ you should be.

That’s why I said, meditation helps with this process, and so does therapy.

So more than actions, it is also beliefs, values, and attitudes.

No, this interpretation of authentic is exactly what I'm shooting at, you should definitely do things to get a specific outcome. If you don't start doing those things and integrate it into your personality, you'll never actually make it part of your personality. Sure it will be inauthentic at first, but you HAVE to go through that stage or else you'll never get there. Bonus points if you understand why those societal guidelines exist and accept that they're not totally bullshit.

The flip side is you don't accept the guidelines that society suggests and you spend your days lonely (waiting for the chance encounter with the person who somehow isn't wired to social expectations) when you could have been working on those muscles, most of which if practiced through your relationship will likely make your relationship better off.

What you shouldn't do is compromise your integrity. Like doing shitty things just because other people say you should.

But there is a distinction between integrity and authenticity that is important. The former is critical, the latter is something that is generally overrated.

> Example, younger me would go on dates, and try to be the person the other person wanted (without realizing this until later in life)... This kind of inauthentic actions

But that's the thing. Being a "people pleaser" was the authentic younger you. Possibly coming out of a place of desperation. Thank goodness you figured your shit out and changed your personality to something that was inauthentic, at least in the beginning

You can gain skills like archery this way.

However, that kind of attitude and frame will not work well for a healthy relationship. People’s feelings are not outcomes you can manage your way towards.

You are, of course, free to do as you like. I’m just sharing some hard-earned experience.

You're not reading what I'm writing. You cannot improve yourself without at some point stepping through an inauthentic phase where you are forcing yourself to try shit that you have no idea what you are doing.

"staying authentic" a priori prevents you from learning healthy relationship dynamics. You will never get there in the first place.

It is an imprecise definition, but to take away more general advice, perhaps this is:

1) Be the best person you can be (and seek to find for yourself what that means, by noticing the people you admire in your life who you judge to be good people)

2) Don't pretend to be something you are not just to find a relationship or impress someone. If you followed 1), then you will be both attractive and acting in a way you feel good about, instead of being an asshole.

This generally agrees with your comment, while adding a bit with point 2) about how authenticity can be defined as "don't be something you are not, unless you genuinely want to change for yourself and yourself only."

I specifically talk about going inward to find out who you really are — and that does mean, it is not about the role model.

Or rather, if you are going to use a role model, there is a particular confusion I advise watching out for. Your own admiration reflects your deep sense of qualities important to you, not necessarily something inherent in the person behind the role model. The role model’s role is not to model behaviors and actions, but to reflect what is already within you.

Once you recognize this feeling of admiration, I advise tracing, with your own awareness and mind, where it is coming from within. That involves meditation, and maybe therapy.

If instead, you chase after that other person, you awareness goes after them. Maybe you luck out, and the person behind the role model will keep reflecting it back to you. Chances are, that is not what will happen.

Hmm. To address this:

Assholes are those who do not have the well-being of others at heart. They are generally wrapped up un psychological armoring, wanting to make an impact while also don’t want to be touched. As such, they have terrible problems with intimacy.

Note that my other two advice addresses those. Being able to care for and contribute to something greater than yourself can’t really be done while being an asshole. Although I wrote a couple sentences about this, this is actually a deep topic to explore.

As far as changing yourself, you’d make effort at changing that because you deeply want that change, not because society expects you to. If someone tried to fake it, it will come up during moments of intimacy, or when the relationship is stressed. It takes tremendous courage to experience the vulnerability that is revealed with intimacy; and social expectation as a motivation by itself is not a deep enough well.

As far as things like flirting goes because it is socially expected … if someone does it like that, at best, it is awkward —- because your actions are not connected to how you really feel —-, often with the other person being put off by it. (Unless they really like you, and they find your awkwardness cute or endearing). Or, it is shallow (social expectation is not a sufficiently deep well to draw from), or manipulative (focusing too much on the outcome, at which point, the other person is not a potential partner or lover, but a piece of meat which should do things if you followed socially expected behavior).

The short answer: you’d end up self-sabotaging, even if you get lucky and get some short term results.

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