falling in love as a common knowledge cascade this old tweet gradually blew my mind in the background and now I can't stop seeing courtship in terms of mating dances
Falling in love as a common knowledge cascade
14 tweets · April 2024 · 273 likes · 8 retweets · read on Twitter
a common knowledge cascade is when new info revealed on one side reveals new info from the other, & so on consider early moves of romance, from strangers to a first kiss. the info that this would happen was there but had to be drawn out in order
it seems to me it goes further. if you keep opening & revealing, you get two people looking at each other and together simultaneously having a vivid shared sense of “you are my life mate” (and the shared future that implies for the two of you in particular, such as kids)
.....or... you get the common-knowledge realization that it's not a fit. which can feel like mutual clarity or can feel like utter heartbreak but if you keep opening & revealing until you can't any more, then one way or another you find out
unlike birds, human mating dances can take months or years, and they involve way more elements: - biological (does he smell good? does she look healthy?) - cultural (does he share my religion? is she well-educated?) - logistical (where will we live?) - &+
to complicate matters further, what humans expect of our mating dances differs between individuals and cultures. different people expect different steps, or in different orders! sex before marriage, or marriage before sex? either can work, but you can't do both!
fortunately, you don't need to deal with everyone's mating dance, but if you're courting someone, you need to resolve all of this between the two of you! and in a way, that itself is the dance 😉💃
there are a bunch of common ways the mating dance can get messed up though! one of them is by ignoring something you care about because it feels like you shouldn't care about it
another kind of mating dance mis-step is to make a sacrifice to the Time Being by eg moving in together when they kinda know they're not good candidates for getting married.
a third way mating dances get messed up is that something that wasn't a problem in eg month two generates fear/dealbreaker vibes when considering getting married, but people don't know how to go back and repair it eg a fight or betrayal or misunderstanding you never resolved
some of these are potentially recoverable, but it's possible that eg under the fight is actually a deep conflict in values that you don't want embedded in the foundation of what's intended to be a lifelong commitment so best to sort that out... before committing.
navigating all of this requires not getting so caught up in the relationship that's happening that you lose sight of the kind of relationship you want to have for life and whether or not this one feels like it's heading towards being that one
if you're keen to learn how to mating dance gracefully, I'm running a course on it next month! I don't have your answers, but I can guide you to noticing them in you learn more & sign up here: mating.nonnaivetrust.dance/?tw=MO1
my marketing hat wants me to leave this thread with just the call to action above but my nerdposter wants to link you to this trippy exploration of wtf common knowledge even is, and he seems to be winning send tweet