I was reading this Brain Pickings article about the intensely loving friendship between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman.

There have been a number of times when I've wondered if I really need or want a romantic relationship, or if I just want a level of closeness and intimacy that is most readily found in the context of romantic relationships, but is not exclusive to them. I feel like healthy platonic love is easier to achieve (assuming you can find a person who reciprocates) because the expectations are different. The things I want from a friend are much less restrictive than what I want from a romantic partner. Being friends is more about who a person is as a person, and our connection on that level. A romantic relationship has more practical necessities for me. Suddenly, the resources the other person brings to the relationship are of dire importance. Education matters. Career matters. Physical appearance matters. Any opinions that affect the course of a shared future matter. I can be friends with someone who doesn't want kids. I don't think I could date someone like that. I could, in theory (although it's not particularly likely) be friends with someone who had dropped out of high school and was working as a janitor at McDonald's. That would be unacceptable in a dating partner.

I feel that I am being reasonable with these expectations. I'm not obligated to open up my dating preferences to include anybody, regardless of the level of friendship we may have. I think that a flaw in my dating decisions has been to accommodate for things that I am not really okay with, because of this idea that personality should take priority over all else. That's an ideal I don't want to strive for anymore. It conflicts with the other things in life that are important to me. Trying to force myself to disregard other factors for the sake of putting personality first has only caused me to suffer. I have been fighting for the other by fighting myself, and it's not worth it. It's never worth it.

This isn't to say that I don't think compromise and even concession don't have a place in relationships, but there is a limit to what you can compromise, and I need to try harder to enforce my boundaries in that regard.

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The past couple days I have been walking around a lot, to take advantage of the weather. It's nice to explore the city. I finally checked out the library downtown, and it's quite a pretty space, although it was also full of what looked like homeless people, judging by the amount of luggage/trash bags they had with them and the smell. I also saw a guy unwrap a block of cheese and just start eating chunks of it.

Yesterday I had my first appointment with a therapist that one of my profs recommended to me. The therapist's office is in this big beautiful historic building downtown, although her actual office is quite small. I'm going to start seeing her weekly. Hopefully it helps with things.

I'm never sure how much of my stuff is resolved and how much I still need to actually work on. Then again, that sort of thing is never static. Things get better and things get worse. Most issues are not items on a checklist that you can be done with and never have to revisit. At best, I think you can get to a level where things are generally manageable, but that's on average. Nobody is ever "cured", which is an uncomfortable thing to hear, but it's true. I've met too many people who insisted they were completely over their problems, but invariably that turned out not to be true. What matters more than being "done" with things is having an open/receptive mindset about your potential problem areas and understanding that you don't know everything and never will, although nobody else does either. We all just have pieces of the world, and I think the most we can do is share those pieces with each other to try to form a more complete (though never fully complete) picture.

I guess my program has been influencing me, though I'm also not sure how different these ideas are from how I already felt. That whole idea that we are always moving towards being more than we are but will never be complete resonates with me, though. It's kind of like how people say it's about the journey, not the destination, except that there isn't ever a destination, only a general direction.

Unrelated music:

"Knights" by Crystal Castles.

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