Still Looking For Alice?
A post inspired by Henrik Karlsson's 'Looking for Alice'. Except....the background is modern dating.
I don’t know how many times I have read and re-read ‘Looking for Alice’. It’s embarrassingly too many times and begrudgingly, not enough.
You see, when Gertrude Stein was asked if she was a Lesbian, she said she ‘likes’ Alice. The like could insinuate everything and yet, nothing. In the jargon of a seemingly modern chiaroscuro, the word is used often, to indicate a preference for things. How I like my coffee scalding hot with no sugar does not translate to how I like my lovers. Or how the seemingly yellow amaltas leaves on grass in Delhi’s spring, remind me of the pink carnations my friend had brought me when I was sick. The colour dissimilarity aside, I hate pink.
Preferences often dictate the algorithmic mechanism of dating apps. A swipe right or left dictates fates. You find yourself mindlessly numbing the din within, waiting for a dopamine hit to replace the sense of void. How much of this is autopilot, one may never know even as the hours tick past. You see, designed to be ‘deleted’ isn’t designed to be fated. And mostly the deletion will only foster the loop of expectation, where going on the app will transcend all your calls for validation. An acquaintance recently told me validation is a basic human need. I found myself seeking it from strangers, friends, lovers, past lovers and even friends in passing. Putting on a show is easier said than done. And no, this is not one of those Terribly Tiny Tots, victim stories of a millennial searching for depth in a shallow.
Karlsson has narrated the tale of stumbling upon his wife, Johanna. His advice is not on ‘dating’ at all, but on finding someone who you deeply resonate with. So the discourse on dating apps rests where it should.
I have a friend who has had associations with various partners. He has bent his heart, moulded and reshaped it for so many lovers. Some stayed some left. Some he fell for and some fell for him. Either way, he would break his heart. Rumi would have found his passion fascinating. Except it wasn’t a deed of passion, as much as wantonness. “Because I like chaos”, he would say. He would also urge me to let loose. Seemingly letting loose would be having an array of lovers. All the shards of a broken mirror I would leave in my wake.
And I did.
I found plenty of love. Some stayed friends. Some have gone and built homes of their own. As Karlsson would put it, I had been ‘training my neural network’.
Modern relationships are thus endless data assimilation exercises. Our neural networks often get overwhelmed with the data available.
But all thought aside, am I still a language model in training? Or one that has lost all ability for coherence because I have reached the stage where exhaustion would triumph over my lack of generating results?
When I first read Karlsson, his world seemed almost idealistic. And also with enough realism juxtaposed with elements of romanticism. He said that when you find someone you shouldn’t let them pass you by. And with that, I was reminded of Linkletter’s famous ‘Before’ trilogy.
There is a scene in the movie where Julie Delphi is explaining to Ethan Hawk how youth is wasted on the young.
I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.
And when it does, we are often so stuck in our pathways, that we don’t recognize the rarity of the connection. Agency gives us the ability to make decisions but robs us of discernment.
As is with any language model, some patterns are a perfect match. The algorithmic nuance of it all. The variable factors in play would be liking similar music artists, having a lust to wander, attaching identities to similar cliques etc. Recently I discovered there is an application that promises to find you a partner based on similar ‘preference’ for memes. Talk about feeding a fantasy to the naive. Primates have evolved enough to gamify love. Not knowing whether the results yielded would be an effect of numbers aligning or just finding a specific human in a sea of strangers.
What I do love about Alice is, often my language model regurgitates incoherent results. Or as Kafka would say,
All language is but a poor translation
I hence, love the idea of Alice. One that lives inside my head. One that I revert to when often life’s disappointments become too harsh to bear. Henrik found his Johanna. As for all of us still searching for the Platonic other half of ourselves, let’s ascribe to the idea of someone.
That someone may or may not exist.
I recall as a teenager when my best friend and I would pour over fanfiction. Wattpads of the world weren’t enough for women to pen down cliche love stories. Tumblr was full of celebrity crushes woven into stories of love, where the protagonist, often a damsel in distress, needs a knight in shining armour. The classic tale of a romance where the female was too proud to admit her desire to be loved and the male often toyed with her feelings before falling for her passion.
Real life isn’t linear. There are no instances of people changing for others. Change is a solitary act. It often involves the build and re-build, if one is self-aware. And the ‘if’ is detrimental to the final act of transformation. Fiction has served women with men written solely to please their favourite faded fantasy. Soon, we became teenagers fed with the ‘idea’ of love. In love with the feeling and ready to bestow it upon a willing subject.
Rats in the lab of love, need the tinkering of chemical reactions to create bonds. Suffice it to say the equations weren’t always balanced.
I would rather accept the act of balancing them to give a perfect reaction. But chemistry is a poor indicator of resonance.
But what is this resonance that Karlsson talked about?
Resonance as an Abstract Concept
The science nerd in me wanted to define the term. So my research led me down rabbit holes.
There is a paradox in what Karlsson has written. If you find someone, and the affections are unreturned- don’t push too hard, too fast. I also saw his perspective as one ingrained in the feminist approach to love.
Before the pitchforks come out, when I say feminist here, I talk about equality. Not the indoctrination of gender in the ideology.
Bell Hooks, the famous writer in her book Communion: The Search for Female Love, wrote how the feminist movement gave women the wherewithal, to reject the love they did not deserve. That comes from having a sense of self stronger than your desire to be needed.
So when Karlsson talked about resonance, it did entail the concept of it in Physics. Resonance is when another vibrating object causes the other to vibrate at the same frequency. If you have gone down the TikTok, Instagram dungeon, notice how so-called messengers of love talk about ‘chasing vs attracting’.
Fascinating then, resonance would thus mean, seamless understanding. Except, let’s go back to the previous discourse of ‘imbalanced’ equations. When you seek a partner, it’s rare to find someone at the same frequency. Most of the time there is a lack of intention, there is an inability to act and for travelers stuck in the time loop of dating apps- there is little to least likely chance of finding resonance.
Chasing isn’t attractive. It’s your attempt at escaping yourself. And resonance isn’t assured. You are lucky if you meet even 10,000 people in your life. It’s a number game, as one friend said. And as is the case with numbers, all it takes is ‘One’.
And that one may or may not exist.
Or as the game of chances, fires up the same neurons in your brain like a gambler, maybe you should read this tweet to continue on the search for meaning.
Little by Little…
Karlsson had me believing, the romanticism of it all. The idealism sounds lovely. But the practical chances of that happening are seemingly on the lower end. Cruelly, I don’t begrudge any of the success stories I hear of. Unfortunately or fortunately, the paradigms have changed.
And so have the intentions.
For most people on the apps, this is the surest way to secure a date to a friend’s wedding. Alleviate the loneliness, even if it means we don’t see that person again. But that’s the game. Dating is hard. Relationships are hard. You are going to sacrifice so much of your beliefs to adopt new ones. The rigidity will consume your sense of self.
But as Karlsson writes, while summing up his search, it is to never assume you know what you are looking for. What endears us to people, besides the shallow advice on the web, is the knowledge that they can embrace parts of us we are repelled by. That they can see in us what we have always thought makes us unlovable and turn it into a quirk that they can love. One of my partners loved my poor sense of direction because that would make me give him a call to ask for navigation advice. And he would be ready with routes, memorised.
Strange is the mysticism of it all.
Am I still looking for Alice? Not really. What if a ‘Betty’ knows me better?