I was 11 the first time I thought I was in love, or let’s say got my first crush and it was on a slim Atesot girl, who had been my classmate and desk mate right from Primary 1. It was the kind of love that lives mostly in the stomach; giddy, embarrassed, half laughing at itself. Back then love was raw and unadulterated, allowed to be whatever I wanted it to be. That was before the word got tarnished. Before movies, TV, think pieces, and X (Twitter) and TikTok therapists decided what love was supposed to look like with think pieces like “wait three months”, “don’t text first”, “leave before you’re left”, “want but not too much”.
As my 20’s start waving goodbye, I found myself reflecting the other week, when I landed on a gem worth sharing. The creator behind it talks about how, in the summer of 2025, a boy introduced her to a series of essays called Looking for Alice by Henrik Carlson, and I thought that they may just be the best dating advice our generation needs to hear.
Here’s what she took from it.
The Orchid and the Moth
In 1862, Charles Darwin received a package in the mail; an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary (the tube at the center of the flower) as long as his forearm. “Good heavens, what insect can suck it?” he wrote to a friend. He figured somewhere in Madagascar there had to be a moth with a tongue long enough to reach the bottom of that flower, because the flower wouldn’t have grown that long unless something had evolved alongside it. He was right, as they found the moth 40 years later.
The author says she thinks about that orchid and moth a lot, about what we evolve for, and whether we actually choose it, or whether we’re just shaped by it, by the movies, the sleepovers, the songs we played on repeat at 19 and called love.
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“Stop Looking for a Type”
Someone once asked the writer Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. To this she said no, she just liked Alice. Not a category. Not “woman with strong opinions and good hair.” Just Alice.
That line, the author says, sums up where most of us go wrong. She admits to describing her own “type” for years: six feet, funny, creative, whatever golden retriever boy archetype fits the vibe. But it’s not just a “women’s conversation.” Men do their own version of it, often just as specifically. Their female partner of preference “has to be a certain height”, “has to have a certain look”, “has to fit a certain image” before he’ll even ask for a first date. Dating apps have arguably made this worse for everyone, turning people into filters, height, job, star sign, etc, before a single real conversation happens.
But a type, whoever is doing the listing, is still a category. And you don’t fall in love with a category. You fall in love with a specific, weird, particular person.
Her advice: stop filtering for a type and start noticing who actually makes you feel alive, excited, and heard. Carlson puts a number on it too, noting that of the eight billion people on earth, maybe 10,000 are someone you could build an extraordinary life with. Which is exactly why, when you meet someone who genuinely rewires your brain, playing it cool or holding out for the checklist is a waste of the odds.
Read Also: Dating Apps Are No Way to Find True Love. Here’s Why
Skip the Small Talk
She references a scene from a Werner Herzog documentary where a prison chaplain, mid-interview, is suddenly asked to describe an encounter with a squirrel and bursts into tears, because no one had ever asked him something real before. That’s the point, the author says: good dates aren’t built on safe small talk, they’re built on real questions. Her ideal first date is a long walk and a late-night conversation, not an activity used as a buffer, because conversation is the fastest way to find out if two people actually fit. Skip the café small talk. Share the parts of yourself you’d normally edit out, and see who leans in.
Don’t Let the Group Decide
Tolstoy tells the story of Pierre, a man who ends up marrying a woman named Helene largely because everyone around him assumes they belong together. At a party, they are seated next to each other, friends begin treating them like a couple, and before long, Pierre finds himself swept along by everyone else’s expectations. He marries her. It turns out to be a disaster.
Carlson believes the story holds an uncomfortable truth about modern dating. A lot of what we mistake for attraction is often just our friends’ reaction to someone. Your roommate dismisses the quiet person you like, while the group chat cannot stop talking about the conventionally attractive one. Before you know it, it becomes difficult to separate your own feelings from everyone else’s opinions.
Carlson’s advice is surprisingly simple. Ask yourself this: would I still like this person if nobody else had an opinion about them? If the answer feels uncertain, it is not necessarily a sign to walk away. It is simply an invitation to examine where your feelings are really coming from. Sometimes the right person is the one your friends cannot quite understand. They make sense to you because your connection is uniquely yours, not something that needs the approval of the people around you.
Carlson additionally suggests, the best relationships rarely fit neatly into the stories we tell our friends. They often defy expectations, resist easy explanations, and make perfect sense only to the two people living them. And perhaps that is exactly how love is supposed to feel.
Love People Like Dostoevsky Wrote His Characters
The Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed Dostoevsky treated his characters as complete human beings who owned the final word about themselves. He never boxed them into his own assumptions. He allowed them to surprise him.
Carlson argues that real love works the same way. Because often, after we fall for someone, we spend months learning everything about them and then quietly stop. We start saying, “I know how they will react,” or “I know what they are going to say,” confusing familiarity with intimacy. But real intimacy is not about having someone figured out. It is about allowing them to remain unfinished, to keep changing and to surprise you.
Carlson believes loving someone means creating space for discovery, asking questions you do not already know the answers to, and allowing the person you love to reveal versions of themselves you never expected. As he puts it, “A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them.” The people we love should never become fixed characters in our minds. They should remain people we continue discovering.
Growing Apart Is Sometimes Growing Together
If someone truly loves you, she reflects, you’ll change, and so will they. A great relationship isn’t two people staying the same, it’s two people who keep diverging and keep finding their way back to each other. Carlson describes panicking when he and his wife developed completely different interests, only to realize the distance made her more interesting, not less familiar. The line she keeps coming back to: “We spoke each other into being.” Not we fell in love. Not we found each other. That, she says, is the real goal, not finding someone to complete you, but someone you can keep becoming yourself with.
Her ultimate closing advice is simple: read Henrik Carlson’s Looking for Alice essays, then send them to the person you’re trying to figure out. If they get it, you have your answer, as to whether they are the one or not.