dating
All about dating. First dates, three years into a relationship, Tinder, and more.
The Bookmark
A Love Story Written Between the Pages THE FIRST BOOKMARK đź”– Sophie discovered the first bookmark three weeks after moving into her new apartment when she unpacked a box of secondhand books she had purchased from the estate sale down the street, and tucked between pages 142 and 143 of a worn copy of "Pride and Prejudice" was a small rectangular piece of cardstock with neat handwriting that read "If you're reading this, you remind me of Elizabeth Bennet which means you're probably stubborn and brilliant and I would have liked to argue with you about whether Darcy deserved her" and the note was unsigned but dated March 2019, and Sophie who had just ended a three-year relationship with a man who had never once asked what she was reading and who considered her book collection a waste of space felt something shift in her chest at the idea of a stranger who left love letters in books for unknown future readers to find, someone who understood that the intimacy of reading is one of the most personal acts a human can perform and that the books you love reveal more about who you are than any dating profile ever could đź“–đź’•
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Humans
The Couple Who Fell in Love
THE ANALOG EXPERIMENT đź“ť When Claire and Daniel matched on a dating app in 2022 their first conversation was identical to ten thousand other dating app conversations happening simultaneously across the city: "Hey how's your weekend going" followed by "Good, just hanging out, you?" followed by the gradually diminishing enthusiasm of two people who sensed potential connection but who were communicating through a medium designed for efficiency rather than depth, and after three days of increasingly sporadic messaging Claire did something that Daniel later described as either the most romantic or the most insane thing anyone had ever done in the history of modern dating: she sent him her mailing address and said "I think we should write letters instead because I want to know who you actually are not who you are in 280 characters" and Daniel who had been about to let the conversation die because it felt like every other dating app exchange that fizzled from lack of genuine connection said yes because the sheer unexpectedness of the request suggested a person worth knowing đź“®
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Humans
AI as a Reflective Surface
Much of the confusion surrounding artificial intelligence comes from treating it as an agent rather than a surface. When people speak about AI “doing the thinking,” “creating the ideas,” or “speaking for someone,” they are often projecting agency onto a system that does not possess intention, belief, or understanding. This projection obscures what is actually happening in many real-world uses. In those cases, AI is not acting as a source of meaning, but as a surface that reflects, redirects, and reshapes what is already present.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast5 days ago in Humans
Why Saying Less Makes Words Feel More Valuable
There is a widely held belief that words gain value through scarcity. When someone speaks rarely, their statements are treated as weightier, more deliberate, and more worth attending to. When someone speaks often, their words are assumed to be interchangeable, disposable, or less carefully considered. This intuition is not entirely wrong, but it is frequently misapplied. Scarcity does affect perception, but perception is not the same as truth, and rarity is not the same as meaning.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast5 days ago in Humans
The Apology That Actually Works
THE ANATOMY OF A FAKE APOLOGY The most common form of apology in modern relationships is not actually an apology at all but rather a linguistic sleight of hand that shifts responsibility from the person who caused harm to the person who was harmed, and the phrase "I'm sorry you feel that way" has become so ubiquitous that most people do not recognize it as the manipulation it actually is, because it contains the word sorry which creates the appearance of accountability while the phrase "you feel that way" redirects responsibility onto the injured party by framing the problem as their emotional reaction rather than the behavior that caused it, essentially saying your feelings are the problem here not what I did, and this non-apology not only fails to repair the damage but actively compounds it because the injured person now has two injuries to process, the original harm plus the dismissal and invalidation of their response to it.
By The Curious Writer6 days ago in Humans
The Sunday Scaries
THE WEEKLY PANIC ATTACK NOBODY QUESTIONS The Sunday Scaries, that creeping dread that begins Sunday afternoon and intensifies through the evening as Monday approaches, affecting an estimated seventy-six percent of American workers according to a LinkedIn survey, has been normalized as an inevitable aspect of adult working life, something everyone experiences and nobody questions, like rush hour traffic or alarm clock misery, a universal discomfort that is treated as the natural cost of employment rather than being recognized for what it actually is: your body's alarm system telling you that something about your work life is fundamentally incompatible with your wellbeing, and the fact that three-quarters of working adults experience weekly anxiety about returning to their jobs should be treated not as a collective shrug but as a public health crisis revealing that the way we have organized work is making the majority of people dread the majority of their waking lives.
By The Curious Writer7 days ago in Humans
