Found in 5 comments on Hacker News
PaulHoule · 2025-02-01 · Original thread
See what it is like from a women's perspective

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

PG's talk about it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh talking about Net Neutrality. I disagreed with Rush about most things but most of the time I thought Rush had some understanding of the issues he talked about. His opposition to Net Neutrality came across as completely ignorant, he didn't seem to know what it was, he was just against it because the phone company told him to be against it, the same way that my son's trans friend hates J. K. Rowling because somebody told them to.

Unlike PG I can point to specific men and women, some trans, who have been hurt by it. That's a step up in evidence.

I've spent plenty of time looking at conference proceedings, review articles and such in the social sciences. If a literature search turns up a conclusive conclusion about anything it's because somebody wrote one paper and nobody followed it up for 20 years.

PaulHoule · 2025-01-06 · Original thread
Also see

https://medium.com/@gettingfrankpodcast/kings-of-the-hill-ho...

and the problem that women often aren't attracted to men who will commit to them until it is too late, see

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

PaulHoule · 2023-07-26 · Original thread
Woman, as they get older, find that “good” men are hard to find, see

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

the problem has a nearly straight line relationship with many men feeling shut out of dating at an earlier age, and if more men withdraw into fantasy women will only suffer for it later on.

PaulHoule · 2023-04-12 · Original thread
The conventional analysis is that this is the worst possible way to look for love.

(1) Eva Illouz in

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

and many other modern authors will say that the longer of a list of lovers you have to choose from the less likely you will choose any of them. Whether you are evaluating a large number of prospects with a large list of criteria (Date me) or evaluating a large number of prospects based on photos (Tinder) the key thing is that the more people you look at the more choices you imagine you have, the more you believe you’ll find somebody better if you look a little longer and the less likely you are to pick any of them.

(2) Stendhal in his classic “On Love”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm

describes how falling in love involves a process of “crystallization” in which your love object appears to be singular and absolutely unique. The process of evaluating a long list is the opposite of this. Even if you are polyamorous and believe you can maintain multiple love relationships over time, that part of it where you are head over heels over someone (e.g. “new relationship energy”) is something you feel for one person at a time.

PaulHoule · 2021-10-05 · Original thread
I took lessons in acting based on this method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meisner_technique

and came to realize that there is a commonality between writing and acting. An actor might not need to think about the arc of a whole story but they need to think about how it is advanced in a single scene. Sometimes even in real-life situations I think about "blocking" and other concepts from the stage. (e.g. Look at drama and improvisational acting in general)

Lately I read this book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Seduction

which has a lot of fiction and non-fiction references oriented around the technology of love ("Tale of Genji", "Les liaisons dangereuses", "Love and Lust") and works over the stories of very interesting people from various directions.

I have been reading the references, reading the references of those references, and going off in other adventures in reading including recent feminist scholarship such as

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

I think that love is the most popular topic for storytelling and this project has vastly improved my ability to confabulate on the subject.

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