2026-06-04
Disclaimer
Short version: the dating posts are not really about "how do I get a girlfriend?" They are about how to build a relationship that can survive an unusually intense, mission-driven, high-variance life.
The author's real dating problem is not attraction, matches, or even sex. It is:
Can I find or build a relationship that survives major differences in values, life mission, politics, ambition, risk tolerance, and future value transitions?
He wants sex, affection, hugs, emotional safety, and deep understanding - but he also wants independence, mission, seriousness, and a partner who does not domesticate him into a normal life. The tension between these two desires drives almost all the posts.
This is probably the cleanest idea in the whole corpus.
The key relationship skill is moving between Type-1 and Type-2 without collapsing into Type-3. This matters more than labels like "long-term," "short-term," "poly," or "monogamous."
Initial compatibility is not enough. People change. They change religion, politics, ambition, city, career, family priorities, views on children, and moral commitments. The author does not trust relationship advice unless it comes from people whose relationships survived real transitions, not just easy years.
The real scarce resources are:
Value differences become serious when they demand conflicting uses of these resources. It is easier to "agree to disagree" abstractly than to decide whose city, whose parents, whose mission, whose emergency, or whose life plan gets priority.
He is very afraid of relationships that blunt variance. He does not want someone whose implicit job is to make him stable, respectable, conventional, and safe. He wants someone who can tolerate, understand, or even participate in a high-risk mission-oriented life.
This is one of the biggest selection filters. Many women might enjoy him for a few months, but later discover they did not really want the life they signed up for.
His case for polyamory is not mainly "more sex." It is that monogamy forces one person to satisfy too many roles: sexual partner, best friend, emotional support, ideological ally, life co-planner, co-parent, etc.
Polyamory, in his frame, allows gradients of intimacy and time investment instead of a binary "life partner or nothing." But he also recognizes that this is mostly theory and that time commitment and emotional commitment may be more linked than he previously thought.
The desired partner is roughly:
He is not mainly looking for shared hobbies, travel, "vibes," or standard domestic comfort. He wants deep understanding, sex, affection, and a partner whose mind/life he can respect.
The main blockers are:
This is why "just go on dates" feels inadequate to him, but also why endless theory is a trap.
The emotional core is loneliness plus distrust.
He wants love, but he does not trust ordinary love to survive contact with his actual values. He wants to be seen, but fears that being fully seen will make most people leave. He wants a relationship, but fears that the search will consume attention needed for his mission. He wants someone extraordinary, but also knows that waiting for extraordinary can become an excuse to remain alone.
So the real conflict is:
"I want someone close enough to matter, but not so mismatched that closeness destroys either my mission or the relationship."
The practical answer is not more abstract dating theory. It is probably:
The whole dating corpus is an attempt to solve this question:
How can an intense, independent, mission-obsessed person find love without either lying about who he is, being domesticated into normality, or destroying the relationship when values change?
On Paul Graham's scale - true, important, novel, and strong - I'd score the dating corpus around 6.5/10 useful.
It is unusually important and novel for a narrow audience, especially on value transitions and Type-1/Type-2/Type-3 relationships. But it loses points for correctness because much of it is speculative, mood-dependent, anecdotal, and under-tested. It is raw thinking, not finished theory.
The surface-level question is: why don't I have a girlfriend, and how do I get one? The deeper question is: what kind of relationship can survive contact with my actual life? I do not merely want someone attractive, pleasant, and available. I want a relationship that can survive extreme ambition, political and moral intensity, possible city changes, major life pivots, my limited attention, my tendency to overtheorize, my need for independence, and the possibility that either person's values change over time. (samuelshadrach.com)
This is why ordinary dating advice feels unsatisfactory. "Go on dates," "be funny," "dress better," "join hobbies," "be emotionally intelligent," and "don't overthink it" may all contain truth. But the metric I care about is not likes, matches, first dates, or even sex. The metric is whether the relationship is still good after six months, after five years, and after one or both people undergo a major value transition. Dating apps give tight feedback loops on shallow metrics, while the core metric has a very long feedback loop. (samuelshadrach.com)
So the problem is partly practical and partly epistemic. I need more real-world data, not just theory. I need to talk to people whose relationships survived major ideological or life transitions, especially atheists over 35 who did not simply outsource stability to tradition or religion. I may need to spend one or two serious weeks running surveys, gathering anecdotes, and interviewing the correct reference classes instead of endlessly theorizing from my room. (samuelshadrach.com)
At the same time, theory is not useless. Dating has long feedback loops, and in long-feedback domains you cannot learn everything by trial and error. If I mindlessly run "hit and trial," I may lose months or years. The goal is not to eliminate trial and error completely - that is probably impossible - but to move from blind trial and error toward informed search. (samuelshadrach.com)
The blunt answer is: maybe sex is the main real reason. When you repeatedly have sex with someone, you often begin to care deeply about them. Maybe that is a large part of what a romantic relationship is. I should not pretend that sex is irrelevant or that all my reasons are lofty. I do not even want to hang out with most male friends very often, so if sex and physical intimacy are removed, I have to ask what exactly makes a woman different from a close male friend in my life. (samuelshadrach.com)
But sex is not the whole answer. A romantic partner may bring a different kind of emotional listening, emotional co-regulation, physical affection, protectiveness, and access to female-pattern social information. The strongest candidate properties are: better emotional listening, the ability to make me feel seen/heard/understood, physical intimacy beyond sex, and a dynamic where I feel protective and she values that protectiveness. (samuelshadrach.com)
The useful question is not "women are different, therefore women help me." The useful question is: what specific properties of female-pattern psychology help solve what specific problems? For example, blockers to effective action are often emotional, not intellectual; a good partner may notice subtle emotional patterns that male friends, cofounders, or mentors miss. But I need to be concrete. What is the blocker? What does she notice? What does she help me update? (samuelshadrach.com)
There is also a basic human need here: hugs, softness, being cared for, and feeling safe. I sometimes intellectualize the whole thing, but part of me simply wants a hug from someone who cares. That is not a fake reason. It is just embarrassing because it is simple. (samuelshadrach.com)
My life has had at least two obvious sources of meaning: deep relationships and meaningful work. The first time I was convinced life was worth living was through close friendships. The other major source of meaning is work that reduces suffering or increases human happiness at scale. The confusing part is that the best love often seems connected to shared work, and the best work may be work that allows more love to thrive in the world. (samuelshadrach.com)
This creates a loop. Strong relationships often require shared goals, because advice, emotional support, and feeling understood are easier when people are facing similar problems. But meaningful work also needs relationships, because humans do not live as abstract utility functions. If I want "optimal love" for civilization, I should probably start by figuring out optimal love for myself. (samuelshadrach.com)
This is why my dating problem keeps expanding into a philosophy-of-civilization problem. In a world where material needs and physical safety are solved, what remains is the problem of relationships: how humans organize love, sex, family, friendship, loyalty, privacy, and work. If I cannot solve this even for myself, I should be suspicious of my ability to solve it for the world. (samuelshadrach.com)
The rough surface-level answer: I like women who are cute, intelligent, emotionally perceptive, direct, independent, growth-oriented, and serious about something. "Cute" and "hot" overlap, but they are not identical; cuteness is partly about the role someone plays, not just their physical appearance. This makes videos much better than photos, because photos show looks while videos show mannerisms, energy, and role. (samuelshadrach.com)
The deeper answer: I want someone who does not reduce my variance. I do not want a relationship whose function is to make me normal, stable, conventional, and domesticated. I want a relationship compatible with a life that could go very well or very badly. If I am trying to do something historically important, I need a partner who understands that work is not a hobby competing with her for attention; it is a core part of me. (samuelshadrach.com)
The ideal partner does not need to be identical to me. In fact, an exact clone may not be ideal. But she should either share my core mission, or at least be able to understand and accept it without constant demotivation. She should be able to hear me, disagree, and still not treat my life plan as fundamentally illegitimate. The type of person who is merely "nice" but wants a normal life may be a bad fit, because late breakups are worse than early breakups. (samuelshadrach.com)
Concretely, I want:
I should also distinguish people I can love from people whose lifestyle fits mine. Love may transcend large differences in values, mental health, or politics. But lifestyle fit is separate: city, time, sex drive, family obligations, risk tolerance, kids, work, values, and emotional availability still matter. I can love someone and still rationally decide that we should not be together. (samuelshadrach.com)
The most useful typology is not "long-term versus short-term," or "poly versus monogamous." It is:
The value-transition problem becomes: can two people move flexibly between Type-1 and Type-2 without becoming Type-3? If one person changes politics, religion, career mission, risk tolerance, or family goals, can the relationship absorb that transition? Or does one person begin hearing: "My partner cannot love me unless I become what they want"? (samuelshadrach.com)
This frame also explains why meeting less often can help across political differences. If someone is Type-2, frequent interaction may make it harder to listen, because the disagreement repeatedly drains motivation. Less frequent interaction can preserve goodwill. The relationship becomes: "I accept you, I can listen when it matters, but I cannot live inside your worldview every day." (samuelshadrach.com)
The problem with political differences is not merely the final opinion. The problem is the generator: the emotions, assumptions, social incentives, and reasoning chain that produce the opinion. I may be able to make someone feel seen if I understand the emotional generator, even if I disagree with the final conclusion. But if I think the emotional generator is stupid, anti-growth, or downstream of a worldview I reject, listening becomes much harder. (samuelshadrach.com)
This is especially severe for long-term goals. If my partner's long-term project is something at least one of my "epsilon-shifted clones" could respect, then I can listen to her suffering and tradeoffs. If her long-term project feels like a dead end produced by bad defaults, I will struggle. Short-term pleasures like visiting a flower bed are easier to accept than long-term plans I see as fundamentally misguided, because short-term experiences do not demand the same existential endorsement. (samuelshadrach.com)
"Safe tech progress" may be a more timeless filter than "ASI risk." In 1980, selecting for "cares about ASI risk" would have been too specific, but selecting for "cares about safe technological progress" might have made sense. Even so, abstract agreement is not enough. Two people can both worship "safe tech progress" and still disagree on concrete actions, making them Type-2 or Type-3 rather than Type-1. (samuelshadrach.com)
The ideal is a partner who shares the deepest mission. The fallback is a partner whose different mission I can genuinely respect, and who can genuinely accept mine. If neither is true, we are building on sand. (samuelshadrach.com)
Marriage is hard because it forces tradeoffs among scarce resources: place, attention, and capital. If I want to spend money on one priority and my partner wants to spend it on another, maybe we can split money. But if I want to live in one city and she wants another, or if one of us needs large amounts of the other's time, the conflict becomes harder. (samuelshadrach.com)
A partner can have her own legacy, loved ones, or mission that she values more than comfort or even survival. I can choose someone whose initial values seem compatible, but values can change after marriage. This is much harder than selecting the right person on day one. A shared legacy might help, but a vague shared legacy is not enough; details will matter under crisis. (samuelshadrach.com)
This makes the usual "have high standards before marriage, then love unconditionally forever" frame confusing. If love is unconditional after marriage, what were the premarital conditions doing? And if future values change enough, can either person honestly promise that love and commitment will remain unchanged? The real experience of conditional love may not feel like strategic bargaining; it may feel like slow disconnection after years of not caring about the same things. (samuelshadrach.com)
The honest answer may be: some relationships will not survive major value transitions. That does not mean they were worthless. An amazing one-year relationship may be better than a mediocre five-year relationship. But if I claim to want a long-term relationship, I need to understand what lets relationships survive transitions rather than pretending initial compatibility solves everything. (samuelshadrach.com)
My best current description of polyamory is: I want to combine freedom of thought/action with long-term commitments and deep investment in people. I am not primarily looking for casual sex, woman friends, or short-term flings, though exceptions may exist. I want the compound benefits of investing in someone over many years, without forcing one person to satisfy every role forever. (samuelshadrach.com)
Polyamory appeals to me because people are hard to compare. If I were forced to have only one friend, friendship itself would become distorted. Similarly, if I must pick exactly one partner for life, the bar becomes impossibly high, because any missing dimension becomes a potential reason to break up. Poly allows gradients: different levels of time, intimacy, support, and commitment, rather than a binary of "life partner" or "remove from life." (samuelshadrach.com)
But the theory has caveats. I lack enough real-world data on poly couples. Societal acceptance is a serious issue in India. Place remains a major constraint. And I have updated that time commitment and emotional commitment may be more correlated than I previously thought; you cannot always distance for months and then resume the same relationship unchanged. (samuelshadrach.com)
Poly may also help with Type-2 relationships: if we disagree deeply, maybe we meet less often, preserve affection, and do not force one person to be everything. But poly does not magically solve value transitions. It only gives more degrees of freedom. (samuelshadrach.com)
A lot of dating is status. I dislike this, but disliking it does not make it false. Women often use status as a proxy for safety, competence, social proof, and desirability. Men, knowing this, are incentivized to pretend they have options. This creates self-fulfilling-prophecy games where confidence, preselection, and apparent abundance become part of attraction. (samuelshadrach.com)
The moral problem is that salesmanship can blur whether you are actually a good match. I would rather be a genuinely good match than seduce someone into choosing me when someone else would be better for her. This is why rejection can sometimes be good: maybe she has information that makes rejection correct, and if so, I should want her to find the better fit. (samuelshadrach.com)
Still, the generic attraction stack seems roughly: status, looks, humour. Status means some niche group respects you. Looks includes strength, grooming, fashion, and physical presentation. Humour may proxy for internal freedom, social calibration, and lack of unresolved conflict. For keeping someone, the stack becomes more like: resolved internal conflict, emotional listening across value differences, and protectiveness. (samuelshadrach.com)
This creates a painful mismatch. I am not especially fun in the normal dating sense, and I am not status-seeking. I dislike many hobby groups, I prefer serious one-on-one conversations, and I often find ordinary social scenes boring. But the data around me suggests fun and status matter. The correct response is not to deny this; it is to find environments where the forms of fun/status are aligned with my values - people with missions, not just corporate jobs, money, travel, and hedonism. (samuelshadrach.com)
A major frustration with dating apps is that many profiles emphasize hobbies, surface tastes, and lifestyle trivia more than values. Hobbies are not irrelevant, but values matter more over decades. "Can make coffee," "likes thrillers," "sarcastic humour," and similar prompts are weak filters compared with ambition, curiosity, emotional intelligence, directness, seriousness, and life goals. (samuelshadrach.com)
But I should not overgeneralize. Some profiles do mention values. The real strategy is to aim for the minority of women who know what they want out of life, rather than rage at the majority for not filtering the way I want them to. (samuelshadrach.com)
Dating apps also make A/B testing tempting, but the feedback is deceptive. Likes, matches, and first dates are not the target metric. Optimizing too hard for them may reduce long-term compatibility. For now, the better plan is probably to keep one authentic long-term-oriented profile for six months, rather than splitting into one "ideal long-term" profile and one "short-term lower standards" profile. (samuelshadrach.com)
My standards for casual sex are much lower than my standards for long-term relationships, but pursuing casual sex has often been a distraction. The median outcome may be mildly fun and self-esteem-boosting, but the downside includes wasted months, emotional chaos, substance relapse, and further damage to self-respect. Given the stakes of my work, even a few wasted weeks can feel too costly. (samuelshadrach.com)
That said, I should not make overconfident claims that casual sex is bad for everyone, or even for all women. Some people may have figured out how to enjoy it well. A key differentiator may be intentionality and actual care: sex is better when people can quickly demonstrate that they genuinely care, even if the relationship is brief. (samuelshadrach.com)
My frustration is mainly with repeated regret loops: if someone repeatedly does something they later regret, then either they lack growth mindset, secretly value something about the behavior, or have a deeper unresolved issue. This applies beyond sex. I want to be around intentional people. (samuelshadrach.com)
The idea of using sex or relationships as ideological leverage is also dubious. People often date within ideological clusters, but "withholding sex" is unlikely to be a reliable mass persuasion strategy; it may instead create resentment and polarization. Average people are usually not radical enough to fully sacrifice relationships for ideology, and many will simply hide or soften their views. (samuelshadrach.com)
One trait I may offer unusually strongly is protectiveness. Not possessiveness, not sexual jealousy, and not male status aggression. Protectiveness means willingness to invest effort, take risk, or act decisively if a partner's life, money, loved ones, or core interests are in danger. I am poly, so this is not about controlling who she sleeps with; it is about defending what matters to her. (samuelshadrach.com)
My broader outlier traits are: rationality, high independence, willingness to be disliked, honesty with loved ones, note-taking/sense-making, protectiveness of the other person's independence, and willingness to play a long-term game while pivoting hard. If I were with someone for years, I would likely have hundreds of pages of notes about them, because deep understanding is how I express passion. (samuelshadrach.com)
This can be good or bad. To the right person, being understood deeply is love. To the wrong person, it may feel intense or invasive. So I should not hide this trait; I should select for someone who wants to be understood in that way and can reciprocate with her own form of attention. (samuelshadrach.com)
The first bottleneck is that I may not like myself enough. Seeing other couples reminds me I want a partner, but one reason I do not have one is probably self-dislike. Another is that I am not actually trying at the level required for the kind of outcome I want. If I want an extraordinary partner, I should expect extraordinary search effort. (samuelshadrach.com)
The second bottleneck is attention. I might want a relationship, but do I have spare attention for a partner? Time is not the scarce resource; attention is. The relationship I currently imagine is relatively minimal: listen to each other, give advice sometimes, have sex, provide affection, and continue with mission. I do not currently have much headspace for shared hobbies, travel, or constant novelty. (samuelshadrach.com)
The third bottleneck is anger and isolation. When I isolate, neuroticism rises and my thinking degrades. I oscillate between seeing many women as dateable and seeing everyone as stupid. Some of this is not about women at all; it is anger at society, loneliness, and the lack of people around me who seem serious about anything important. (samuelshadrach.com)
The fourth bottleneck is lack of curiosity. I can fake curiosity and sometimes real curiosity follows, but lately my curiosity toward many people has died because I judge them too quickly. This makes dating harder, because dating requires sustained curiosity about another person. (samuelshadrach.com)
The fifth bottleneck is data. I do not trust most friends' relationship advice because I do not know whether their relationships can survive major life transitions. I also do not fully trust advice from other countries because India's dating base rates, parental control, and subcultural constraints differ from the US/UK/EU contexts where much dating advice is produced. (samuelshadrach.com)
In-person interaction builds trust far better than text or video. This matters both for political persuasion and for dating. If someone only sees my written views, they may misread me as more hostile, abstract, or alien than I am. Meeting in person gives more bandwidth: body language, warmth, humor, calibration, and immediate repair. (samuelshadrach.com)
This implies a practical dating strategy: less abstract internet argument, more in-person meetings with the right reference classes. Not random hobby groups full of people I cannot respect, but meetups and spaces where people have actual life missions. If I am lonely, I should not merely swipe more; I should build or enter environments containing people serious about something. (samuelshadrach.com)
I am jealous of some people who have partners because I suspect they got those relationships partly by not paying the social costs I paid for my beliefs and mission. But this may be a story in my head. Simpler explanations may be: they have better mental health, larger social circles, more fun, more status, or more ordinary compatibility. If I want their dating insights, I should ask for data, not sit in jealousy. (samuelshadrach.com)
Being ignored does not necessarily mean being disliked. On apps, in communities, or in cold messages, no response can mean people are busy, unconvinced, confused, distracted, or simply not moved enough to act. "Not persuaded" is different from "actively hates me." This matters because overinterpreting rejection worsens neuroticism and makes future messages worse. (samuelshadrach.com)
Before opening a dating app, I should ask: Am I unhappy? If yes, do not use the app. Will I get compulsively sucked in and lose sleep, work, sobriety, or attention? If yes, stop. Dating apps used from desperation will leak desperation into messages. (samuelshadrach.com)
I need to understand not just "what fields women enter," but why ambitious women become ambitious. Male ambition is often framed as competition, status, dominance, achievement, and attracting women. Female ambition may have different shapes: beauty/status competition, people-oriented domains, attachment to a powerful partner's mission, community-building, art, psychology, bio/chem, activism, or something I do not yet understand. (samuelshadrach.com)
This matters because my ideal partner may not look like a male-coded ambitious person in female form. She may not want to be "main character" in the same way I do. She may want to influence, support, understand, heal, organize, or build in a different mode. If I only search for masculine-coded ambition, I may miss the relevant women. (samuelshadrach.com)
This should become a survey/research question: what do ambitious women actually want, what motivates them, what sacrifices are they willing to make, what kinds of men do they want, and how do their stated preferences differ from revealed preferences? (samuelshadrach.com)
Sex creates vulnerability. Privacy around sex may exist partly because the emotions and information revealed during sex can be exploited by outsiders, competitors, enemies, or communities. People seem to build onion layers: self, couple, friends, extended network, community, nation. Modern atomization removes many layers, often leaving only the individual, the partner, maybe a few friends, and an alien nation-state. (samuelshadrach.com)
This complicates my attraction to transparency. I may lean toward a low-privacy or zero-privacy world in theory, but sex and vulnerability are areas where I should approach the question with curiosity rather than defensiveness. If intimacy exposes information that can be used against people, privacy may be more important than my abstract ideology admits. (samuelshadrach.com)
Schedule serious dating research time. Block one or two weeks for dating surveys/interviews instead of expecting this to happen on a weekend. Include atheists over 35, people whose relationships survived value transitions, poly couples, ambitious women, and couples with major political differences. (samuelshadrach.com)
Map value-transition failure modes. Ask which transitions break relationships: religion, politics, career mission, kids, city, family obligations, money, risk tolerance, sex, poly/mono, mental health, and attitudes toward death. Track scarce resources: place, attention, capital. (samuelshadrach.com)
Use the Type-1/Type-2/Type-3 frame. For every potential partner, ask: do we actually agree, agree-to-disagree-yet-accept, or not accept? Can we move between Type-1 and Type-2 over time without becoming Type-3? (samuelshadrach.com)
Do not optimize dating apps for shallow metrics. Keep the long-term-oriented profile for at least six months. Do not make a second short-term profile unless the current strategy clearly fails and I can do it without inauthenticity or distraction. (samuelshadrach.com)
Meet mission-oriented people in person. Go through the list of Bangalore meetups/recommendations for people with life missions. Stop complaining until I have actually searched the relevant environments. (samuelshadrach.com)
Improve basics without betraying values. Gym and physical presentation are reasonable. Fashion is harder because I dislike signaling art I do not endorse, but I can still improve. Humour/fun may be improved by finding genuinely interesting people and activities rather than pretending to enjoy boring scenes. (samuelshadrach.com)
Practice listening across value differences. The skill is not "agree with everyone." The skill is understanding the emotional generator well enough that the other person feels seen, while still preserving my own goals and not faking agreement. (samuelshadrach.com)
Be ethical: no manipulation, no coercion, no using intimacy as a weapon. The dating problem should be solved by selection, honesty, boundaries, and mutual understanding - not by deception, crisis-engineering, or exploiting vulnerability. This is especially important because the source notes repeatedly notice how relationships, ideology, sex, and power can become entangled. (samuelshadrach.com)
I want love, sex, affection, deep understanding, and a partner who can help me become more effective. I also want freedom, mission, independence, and the ability to make extreme life pivots. I do not want an average relationship that makes me normal. I want either:
The wrong relationship is one where we initially enjoy each other, but over time she realizes she wanted stability, normalcy, and a conventional life, while I wanted mission, risk, intensity, and history. The right relationship is one where affection does not require lying about that difference.
I should stop pretending this can be solved purely by thought. I need data, better environments, in-person trust-building, and enough emotional stability that I am not using theory as a substitute for contact with reality.
Paul Graham's "useful writing" frame evaluates writing by whether it says something true/correct, important, novel, and strong/unequivocal without becoming false; he treats these as components that combine into usefulness. (paulgraham.com)
| Referenced writing | Correctness | Importance | Novelty | Strength | Overall usefulness | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:| | Samuel Shadrach dating-note corpus, as raw material | 4/10 | 8/10 | 7/10 | 8/10 | 6.5/10 | | This collated version | 6/10 | 8/10 | 6/10 | 7/10 | 6.8/10 | | Paul Graham, "How to Write Usefully" | 9/10 | 9/10 | 8/10 | 9/10 | 8.8/10 |
Why the raw corpus scores that way: it is highly important to the author and probably useful to a narrow class of intense, mission-driven people trying to reason about dating and value transitions. It is also unusually novel in frames like Type-1/Type-2/Type-3, relationships surviving ideological transitions, and "place/attention/capital" as scarce relationship resources. But correctness is limited because many claims are explicitly anecdotal, speculative, mood-dependent, or marked by the author as needing surveys/data. Strength is high, sometimes too high: the notes are vivid and forceful, but often raw enough that strength outruns evidence.
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