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Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland

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I was reminded of this story the other day after two friends, independently of each other, asked me for dating advice. I don’t know much about dating. The reason they ask me is that I am a nerd and I am married to Johanna. Johanna is an Alice. That is: she is a singular human being, that I happen to love. She has an insane amount of integrity and a gravity field in her left ear that pulls my words out of orbit. I don’t know anything about dating, but I know, at least, how I found someone like that. The first thing to realize is that, unless you have found one, you don’t actually know what an Alice is. When I was seventeen, my crushes were random. As if I was an untrained neural network trying to predict which image was a cat. Maybe this flurry of tan-colored pixels? Maybe this long bendy green thing? I got disappointed a lot, which was great because it meant by my early twenties, I could tell what I liked and what made me want to smash a cucumber to my face. This happens to everyone, I

Alice B. Toklas This is part 1 of Looking for Alice, a series of essays about the history of my relationship to Johanna. See also: part 2, “Dostoevsky as lover”; part 3, “Relationships are coevolutionary loops”; part 4, “When I accept myself just as I am, I change”; and part 5, “Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion”. Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. Stein answered no, I just like Alice. I was reminded of this story the other day after two friends, independently of each other, asked me for dating advice. I don’t know much about dating. The…

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