2026-06-10
Update
- Jacob Falcovich has now also joined the mass murderers working on at the frontier AI companies.
- Since Jacob is not that influential a person, I will avoid making too many public comments on this for now. But the short version is yes, I'm upset about it, and think this is a bad decision on his part.
- I now downweight all his advice a little bit, but still think it has non-zero value.
2026-03-09
More ramblings on who I think I want to date
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- target audience - myself (not a future partner, I think)
Main
- I appreciate Jacob Falcovich's blog for reminding me that the actual things that make relationships work might be a lot more subtle than the big criteria I tend to list out. Like yes, I do have a few big criteria which I still endorse (being straight, poly, being atheist if you want kids, etc). But apart from this, a lot of the most important things are more subtle and hard to notice, especially without enough experience. (I dont want to waste my energy collecting "experience" if I can just one-shot it instead. Dating is more of an energy sink than a time sink tbh)
- Lifestyle
- I think I basically just want someone where we both listen to each other's problems, optionally give each other advice, have sex maybe a couple times a week (idk the frequency) and that's it. I don't actually have headspace for hobbies and what not, even with a partner. Like, can I literally make time for hobbies, yes. Do I have headspace for it, no. Attention is the scarce resource, not time. Life is what you make out of it. And like, I could actually enjoy hobbies more if I focussed on them. I have enjoyed atleast some hobbies in the past. But right now I am choosing not to focus on any of that.
- I really want someone who does not reduce my variance of outcomes in life. I am someone whose best outcomes are ending up in prison or ending up in the history books. If I am still making angry blog posts 5 years from now, but hadn't achieved much, I would consider that an even worse outcome than if I had literally gone to prison. I want a partner who is genuinely deeply okay with me going to prison if that's what it ultimately takes. I know this is a male-coded thing, women generally want more stability and men are higher variance. I see a lot of marriages as blunting people's variance and I really don't want that in my own life. If you date me you're signing up for quite possibly the biggest adventure of your life. Do you actually want that, or no? Don't just instinctively answer, actually think about it.
- Communication norms
- I think we are going to have lot of disagreements, especially on political stuff or operational stuff. Jacob's blog is right actually, often I am going to get the best advice on operational stuff from a cofounder or mentor or friend or similar. Why is that something I am uniquely looking for in a partner? I want someone who understands that I am going to reject their advice sometimes because I actually do know more about the niche I'm working in, than they do. We can talk a lot about it yes, I love communicating explicitly, but end of the day I will have take a lot of important decisions myself and we won't always agree. I want someone who is okay with that.
- As mentioned before, I really don't have time for bullshit and drama. I want someone who can communicate directly. I can putting effort into listening to you, only if I get the sense that you are also putting effort into explaining yourself well. I don't have interest in passive-aggressive behaviour myself, and I ideally don't want a partner who engages in too much of this. Life is too short, and we might die anyway, why not use the limited time we have to actually appreciate each other, or else actually do something important.
- Growth mindset is very important to me. I'm not saying you have to be as obsessed with growth mindset as much as I am, but I don't ideally want someone who is okay with a stationary life. I want someone who has some goals that they work towards, and faces obstacles of their own, and then actually grows through the process. Making mistakes is fine, suffering is fine, wanting me to listen is fine. Consistently making the same mistake multiple times, and then not trying to put some serious effort to fix it, that is what I have a problem with. Often if you can't fix something despite multiple attempts, there is something deeper going on. I want you to confront it not run away from it. Like I said, life is short and we might be dying soon.
- Vice versa, I also want someone who can aggressively call me out on my bullshit. I want someone who can nudge me to notice important things about myself that I am failing to notice. Aggressive doesn't have to mean shouting, I just mean don't let things hanging when they could have been addressed instead. I'm not saying you have to give me all the advice for how to do my work. But often there's subtle emotional stuff that's easier for a (female) partner to notice, than say my (probably male) cofounder or friends would. Blockers to effective action are often emotional. I want someone to help me on those aspects. I want someone to call me out even when I find it unpleasant and push back.
- I want someone where we can figure out communication norms more explicitly. Like, do you want advice or do you want someone to listen. How do I know when you want which, should I ask this in every conversation or is there a way I can guess this implicitly. With male friends I almost always default to giving advice (some of my male friends also told me they want that), but when people want someone to listen I have to pause and adjust. Eventually our norms will become automatic and a force of habit, but I may need a short initial adjustment phase, even if we are clear what the communication norms are.
- I don't mean we have to be super formal about it. That's a failure mode I have run into previously, of trying to formalise things too much. Maybe I will just correctly make guesses whether you want advice or listening, just by looking at your body language or something. I'm just saying this may or may not get worked out implicitly.
- Trust
- I think some of the above communication norms I specified only work if you have a deep underlying trust that no matter how things go, we are not going to lose the relationship so easily. I am not going to break up at the first sign of trouble, even if we don't know each other very long. I have been implicitly doing something like Selfless dating atleast some of the time anyway, but now I want to be more explicitly doing this. (I have also spent an annoying amount of time unsuccessfully chasing casual sex, which I now think is waste of time, and I want to do less of that. Like, I think casual sex with the right person can be great, but also, not my priority to search for, and I have been approaching it all wrong.)
- I don't think I've ever broken up with someone or distanced with someone over communication hurdles. I just aggressively call people out, like here's why what you said doesn't resonate or make sense or whatever, but I don't close the channel of communication. It is true I am often miserable and I don't commuicate these things in the best way. I will work on that, especially in context of relationship, more than with strangers (both are related though). If you can help me on this stuff too, that would be great.
- Politics
- Unless you're very hard core in some opposite direction to me, I don't actually care that much what your politics are. Again, this is the type of thing that is easy to say but hard to do in practice. All things equal, I really appreciate people who are hardcore and serious about something, not just LARPing. Unfortunately if you are super hardcore about say, leftist politics, that is a dealbreaker for me.
- I have fairly negative view of leftism as a political ideology. Explicitly mentioning this because my profile says I am poly, and leftists are the largest sub-category of poly people, be it in India or other countries. It is very boring for me to have to argue this with random women, and at this point I don't want to waste time arguing whether billionaires are good or bad for society, or some other stupid shit, unless I actually get evidence you're open to changing your mind on it. Could I make a relationship with a leftist work, yes, but the only ways it'll work are if you're quite unusual as compared to average leftist, or if you're not hardcore (which is a minus point but not a dealbreaker for me).
- Passion
- I am someone who is quite passionate about the limited things I do. This includes yes being passionate about a romantic relationship. Like, I'm obsessed with making notes about stuff like because I realise how insanely high the bar for good relationships actually goes, and I don't wanna be stuck in one that's just mildly good, but not amazing. I think first-hand experience has just raised my expectations a lot here.
- Not just that, but they're not hard to find? Like, I don't actually think outlier-level amazing relationships are that hard to find, if I enter into it with the right intentions. Maybe reality will prove me wrong but this is what I genuinely believe.
- To be clear, I'm not saying good intentions are enough. It's entirely possible we break up after a year, or a I shift cities and we break up, or a number of other outcomes.
- I'd rather have an amazing relationship that lasts a year than a mediocre one that lasts 5.
- Understanding
- I think for me, being passionate about a relationship just means gaining deep understanding. Like, your mind is a rubik's cube I wanna solve, and figure out like clockwork. I make notes on lots of my friends, but even then I don't often make use of these notes because there's no time and I don't prioritise the friendships that much. Maybe I would prioritise a relationship more than I prioritise my friends. If we are together for 5 years, expect me to have atleast a hundred pages of notes about you by the end of it. Most of it will be rambles but the few insights I get about you will make up for everything.
- Other things people talk about when they say passionate are - having passionate sex, doing lots of impromptu activities, travelling a lot, obsessed over some shared hobby, spending lot of time paying attention to each other, and so on. Apart from having sex, I think all of these are less important to me, because like I said I have a mission to fulfill right now. I used to be more impromptu but now I'm not, when it comes to things that are fun but not mission-oriented. If you very particularly want one of these other things, you should let me know soon, and we can figure out if that'll actually work or not.
- Staring at death
- Increasingly prominent theme in my life nowadays is just staring at death. Staring at death tends to remind me what is actually important. Someone I love is one of those important things. Not number one thing but number two thing. Or so I think.
- Having someone to talk to about these things would be nice. Maybe someone who understand this but still has a unique perspective on it that's different from mine.
- Morality
- I often increasingly wonder if I'm a good person or not. I increasingly see morality as this big narrative game. I can so transparently see people around me fall for all sorts of cached ideas, and I can go point out the exact propagandists who made them that way, or the exact situation that made them that way, or so on. It makes me see people less like people and more like mindless automatons.
- Since I can't rely on people around me to help me figure out my own morality, I have to figure out myself. This is challenging and at times disorienting. I voluntarily took on this challenge, so I am not blaming anyone.
- I think someone who has more faith that they see me as either a good person, or aligned to their own values, could help.
- I do not follow a deontological code of non-violence. I think some violence is good actually. I think I personally should be violent, the open question is how much. I don't think community/harmony or stability/order or justice/fairness are important parts of my moral foundations. There are nuances here that we can discuss.
- We don't have to fully agree here, although again, large differences could end up in a dealbreaker. I think it's possible to work things out in short-term but in the long-term, these type of things do tend to break relationships apart IMO. Open to having my mind changed.
- Humour
- I am the opposite of a funny person. I am only mildly funny and crack lame jokes with people I trust, and with the average person I often don't do even that. Maybe you being more funny can help (speaking from experience with both friends and ex), but it's very much not a requirement or anything.
Will reiterate the PG quote on great work on this because I love it.
Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.
2026-03-10
- Shadow
- I miss simplicity and talking to simple people. When I stop to remember these past experiences, I am at times sad how complicated my life has become. But I think my current life is necessary. Waging war is not supposed to be fun. I don't think about it that much nowadays though, I'm just single-track focussed on my current mission. I think if you keep consistently recollecting past events, it means you're not truly over them. My frequency of being nostalgic about these past events has reduced over the past year, and I think this is fine.
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