mating dance
27 linked references
November 21st, 2025
- if I were trying to write more about mating dances, one obvious way to do it would be to take transcripts of 1:1 sessions from the course and convert them into anonymized blog posts
July 2nd, 2025
- vaguely mating danceish, about divorce rate - most people end up married even with 50% divorce rate because of remarriage
March 6th, 2025
- > This is interfering with people finding a life partner: “FOBO, or fear of a better option, is the anxiety that something better will come along, which makes it undesirable to commit to existing choices when making a decision”. At some point, one must choose and commit.
- from a friend on fb ., quoting
- (this article mostly doesn't talk about marriage proposals)
- my reply:
- > I'm very surprised to hear you say this, because I have been regularly (including as recently as yesterday) quoting something you said last year about the idea that it's not so much "choose and commit" but that if you go through the right process, you'll suddenly *realize* that this is your best option. And that that realization will feel *obvious*, not like a "choice" at all, let alone a difficult one. The clarity will be experienced as a relief of that anxiety, not as an attempt to overcome it. This is how I see it (and what I teach in eg mating.nonnaivetrust.dance/)
The way you phrased it was something like "you'll stop wondering 'is this the best I can do?' and suddenly go 'whoa! this *IS* the best I can do!' and it'll feel like a relief and a clarity and a huge joy, not like resignation or gritting one's death and deciding".
And the "one must choose and commit" message in this post seems totally counter to that.
January 11th, 2025
- relevant to meeting your person and knowing you've met them
- part 3 of the previous — "Relationships are coevolutionary loops"
- gorgeous articulation of an omniwin example too
December 11th, 2024
- mating dance - write a thread on physical attraction as an "unfortunate necessity" - ur an animal tho
November 15th, 2024
- mating dance - rarebird.app/ is another matchmaking app designed to create deep connections not just hookups
August 21st, 2024
- sorta relevant to mating dance stuff
August 1st, 2024
- mating dance tweets to maybe respond to
July 19th, 2024
- Jess > "had a relationship with an imaginary lover... which allowed me to see that he could be that lover"
- when I imagined that lover, there was someone I was loving. the relationship I was having was one of loving. not comparing them to anyone.
- there are things that would make me unable to have that loving relationship with someone. relationships they could have with the truth, for instance, where it's like... I'm not going to open my heart that way—and I mean that very somatically.
May 25th, 2024
- mating dance - tweets to maybe respond to
April 30th, 2024
- mating dances — embodied ease & exquisite interpersonal calibration
April 29th, 2024
- mating dance tweets maybe
- > Leave as soon as you see evidence of his disinterest in those things.
- Part of the question is... why is this so hard so often? Seems to me people need support in this, which is part of why I was
April 27th, 2024
- tweets to respond to or riff on, mostly mating dance related
- in some cases, wanting to be polyamorous is because someone isn't that into the people they're with
- polyamory can be a great cope/strategy for keeping your options open while still getting sex and intimacy, if you don't have any prospects you feel excited enough about to be exclusive with
- thread to respond to
- a diff lulie thing, kinda praising me:
- maybe good feedback here
- re taking seriously
- resources for SF scene goal
- relevant to trust in terms of aliveness
- - courtship & dating, that christian kid who wrote the stupid book he later recanted
February 8th, 2024
- mating dance — good commentary tweet about the cost of finding out
- > the part that seems off about the original tweet is that you dont actually get to know how good of a match someone new would be, and attempts to find out are costly to the existing relationship (if only via opportunity cost, efforts that could have been spent improving)
February 2nd, 2024
- mating dance example - kinda jank
December 24th, 2023
- mating dance - a take from Jess
December 23rd, 2023
- mating dance here's a decent take on some stuff with dating, that vibes with the mating dance theory stuff
- I have replied
- mating dance supposedly there aren't much correlations between how people meet and success
November 24th, 2023
- case study: ER & J — they mutually dropped into really deep psych intimacy, which made it hard to go back and do earlier steps and also hard to get out of the rship
October 2nd, 2023
- file under mating dance gone wrong
September 21st, 2023
- on mating dance theory
- some difference between transparent/collaborative mating dances and obfuscated/coercive mating dances
- an example of a dishonest mating dance:
- like the classic tho idk how common pregnancy => so you have to stay "baby-trap"
- (which goes in both directions, men/women)
- (this can be conscious or unconscious)
- I really don't feel confident what's going on for these people, but I could imagine it's some sort of sense of being unworthy of the relationship one would want to have, and/or desperation to secure this relationship
- (plus a usually-misguided belief that having a kid will in any way help with that)
- a weirder one is something like using the relationship with someone to prove something
- eg "prove that I can commit"
- but also any dynamic where one partner keeps going even though they don't trust that the other isn't kind of tricking them mating-dance-wise
- even if there isn't an intended trick
September 18th, 2023
- I have a strong suspicion that what's going on here is that people have a mating dance order, and going out of order will fuck you up
- and for many (but not all) people, their mating dance wants to read physicality as one of the very first steps
- and in person, this just HAPPENS
- and the guy doesn't need 6' of physical stature, but he needs enough presence etc
- and if she builds up a sense of who he is, and then he turns out to be shorter than she anticipated, this feeling of disappointment is hard to recover from, hence trying to solve that in advance
- but fixating on height is a mediocre proxy for what she actually cares about, leading to guys being frustrated
- I think the solution to this specific thing would be:
- some decent algos do initial sorting of people based on interests etc
- a friend of the dating-woman vets the guy for conversational vibe, non-creepiness, etc
- and then literally their first interaction IS meeting in person for date 1
- that would let the mating dance proceed in roughly the right order