Looking for Alice (2023)

Summary

Alice B. ToklasThis is part 1. You can read part 2 here and part 3 here.Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. Stein answered no, I just like Alice. I was reminded of this story the other day after two friends, independently of each other, asked me for dating advice. I don’t know much about dating. The reason they ask me is that I am a nerd and I am married to Johanna. Johanna is an Alice. That is: she is a singular human being, that I happen to love. She has an insane amount of integrity and a gravity field in her left ear that pulls my words out of orbit.I don’t know anything about dating, but I know, at least, how I found someone like that.The first thing to realize is that, unless you have found one, you don’t actually know what an Alice is.When I was seventeen, my crushes were random. As if I was an untrained neural network trying to predict which image was a cat. Maybe this flurry of tan-colored pixels? Maybe this long bendy green thing? I got disappointed a lot, which was great because it meant by my early twenties, I could tell what I liked and what made me miserable.This happens to everyone, I guess. But some of my friends are noticeably worse at generalizing from their experiences. They keep making similar mistakes. Why is that? My guess is that those who predictably date the wrong people tend to think more categorically. A relationship goes up in flames. But instead of thinking that was a mean girl, update the neural net to avoid traits A, B, and C, they go, oh, you know . . . girls. Or, they do the same to themselves: I have a weakness for that type. They also think about relationships in categorical terms.As if it is something they know how to define.But when Gertrude Stein declined to label her desire as lesbian, she was, as I understand it, saying something like this: thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match for the particular type of individual I resonate with.Some people think Stein was lying wh...