on compatibility
These days I crave space to think, to discover, the way someone craves food or sleep after stretches of being deprived.
Specifically, I crave that feeling of being able to follow the thread of curiosity, having long days to linger on abstract things, concepts with no direction, no end. I miss being a kid, when you had endless space to discover what you liked. I was rewarded back then for curiosity, nowadays I’m rewarded mostly for efficiency and clarity.
Lately I’ve been thinking about compatibility. Which is this amorphous concept that people usually refer to in the context of dating or job searching.
I used to have a lot of misconceptions about both. Mostly that you had to be 98% perfectly compatible with someone to even begin dating them. Or that you had to fit a certain job description to a tee to even apply to it. Now my working hypothesis is that you need 70% of core baseline compatibility (things that don’t change) and then the 30% (things that do) evolves over time. You have to wait a little to see if it evolves in the right direction.
The idea of a good fit is inherently elusive. What does good fit actually look like? In the case of dating, is it someone with similar taste in ideas and people, or someone good at intuiting your needs, or someone with the same lifestyle? How do you rank or weight what you want?
Deep down, I think we all know what compatibility feels like because we’ve felt it before in at least one arena of life. It might be work or platonic friendships or hobbies. It is that click of pure recognition. It feels… natural. Instinctual, almost. And with time, your relationship to said thing or person evolves in a deeper, truer, more meaningful way. For all of my closest friends I knew almost immediately upon meeting them that they could be really important to me. Like how J and I became inseparable after our first proper meeting outside our college dorm. That feeling is rare, isn’t it?
On the other hand, I’ve experienced a lot of silly anguish over things that just simply weren’t right. No matter how I forced or tried to pretzel myself into something, I felt off, misaligned. Like I was slotting myself into a ill fitting jigsaw puzzle with force just because I thought the end picture might be beautiful.
If you find yourself contorting yourself into a version of yourself you don’t love, into a version that feels untrue, then it probably means it’s just not a fit. It’s as simple as that. E.g., if your nervous system is always stressed around a friend, or you’re constantly despairing if your romantic interest actually likes your or not, or if you wake up absolutely dreading what your days consist of. That’s no real way to live: without conviction or faith or hope.
I saved this passage from Brianna Wiest:
The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.
You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right. When you try to force it into a place in your life in which it doesn’t belong. You get split; you breed this internal conflict which you cannot resolve. The more it intensifies, the more you mistake it for passion. How could you ever feel so strongly about something that isn’t right?
One of my core beliefs is that what is right for you won’t escape you, won’t pass you by. And when it’s right you’ll know instinctively, you won’t doubt it. How do I reconcile that with knowing compatibility evolves and requires work? I don’t have the answer, dear reader. But if I want to make better choices, it means I have to figure that out.
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PPS: you might like related essays, gut feelings and the patterns that make us
Life inputs
Thinking of experimenting with form this summer. Should I do a series? I’m thinking ‘letters from Michigan’, ‘letters from Oslo’ type newsletter series. I’m also bringing a film camera so hopefully will take some pictures of everywhere I’ve been and make it more of a visual diary.
What I’m consuming:
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life was adapted for the movie Arrival. I thoroughly enjoyed Chiang’s other short story collection Exhalation as well)
The Dune 2 Trailer looks epic and I can’t wait
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
I started re-listening to the podcast The Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish
This piece by Sasha on openness and responsiveness
Desire Lines substack is elegant and poetic:
Good thoughts. However, would you consider: Your understanding of truth appears to be subjective, based on personal feelings and experiences. However, it raises an important question: does this subjective truth bring certainty? This is something individuals should reflect upon when considering the nature of truth. Speaking from my (limited) knowledge of Christianity, truth is seen as objective and rooted in the nature of God. This objective truth provides a sense of certainty. While personal feelings can change over time, leading to situations like divorce, it's worth noting that at the time of commitment, individuals often felt the very emotions you aspire to experience.
Love this essay. I think you’re right, compatibility can and often does evolve. And if there’s a distinction between compatibility and fit, it’s that fit is more readily apparent, or should be. I feel like I can recognize fit fairly quickly, then assuming it’s there I trust compatibility will likely follow. If that makes sense.