January 8, 2026
Love, but please date it
Looking for Alice
Sweet love advice collides with the comment section’s time-stamp police
TLDR: An essay urges ditching labels to find “your person,” blending a love story with practical dating advice. The top reaction wasn’t romance—it was a nitpick to add “(2023)” to the title, sparking a split between swooners, skeptics, and meme-makers debating labels, math-y love, and comment-section priorities.
A tender essay about finding “Alice”—your person, not a label—landed online and the community did what the community does: they fell into feelings… and then immediately argued about the title. The author riffs on Gertrude Stein, saying you don’t love a category, you love a person, weaving in a meet-cute with Johanna and advice to talk to lots of people until patterns appear. Cue the comments: the loudest voice? The classic, “Should have (2023) in the title.” Yes, romance met the calendar police, and the calendar police won the first round. Beyond the time-stamp drama, readers split hard. Some swooned over the sincerity—“finally, dating advice with a soul”—while skeptics called it self-help poetry dressed up as brainy metaphor. Others sparred over the Stein line: is rejecting labels brave clarity or convenient dodge? The nerdiest jokes flew fast: quips about “training data,” “overfitting on your ex,” and “updating the model after a breakup” turned heartbreak into meme-work. A smaller camp side-eyed the “10,000 potential partners worldwide” bit, rolling their eyes at quantifying chemistry. But the vibe was undeniable: half the crowd wanted tissues, the other half wanted a time-stamp—and everyone had a take.
Key Points
- •The essay uses Gertrude Stein’s remark to argue for focusing on individuals rather than categorical labels in attraction.
- •The author describes learning relationship preferences through experience, comparing early crushes to an untrained neural network.
- •A recommended approach is to interact with many people to detect patterns in who feels genuinely compatible.
- •By early twenties, the author identified preferred traits such as kindness and intellectual voracity.
- •The author recounts first meetings with Johanna in 2011 and infers compatibility by observing her interactions and interests, including a discussion of 1800s Northern Sweden.