About love and dating.

I was in an online discussion about love, about dating, about how soon one can know that someone is worth a further date or not, and whether that is a matter of “emotion” or “thinking it through”.

My take:

In many aspects of life, what we need, what we want, and certainly what is good for us, is rarely intellectually self-evident. It is, if we are fortunate, unconsciously recognized and made manifestly self-evident by non-intellectual cognitive channels such as affect, intuition, drive, dream, “self-destructive behavior” that isn’t, or some other way.

Our lack of socially developed widespread sophistication in recognizing this fact, accounting for it, describing it, learning when to trust it vs reject it, let alone lack of teaching this as part of rearing new people, is yet another sign, or maybe a consequence, of the way in which Western culture is infantile.

And I say that as a highly intellectual, analytical, anti-woo sort of person.