The ideal partner

a psyop designed by your enemies to weaken you

Some cat people crave dog whistling.

The ideal is someone compatible: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically.

Compatible is a funny word, for virgos, tauruses, capricorns, scorpios and other such party poopers it means “practical”.

Someone from a similar background with equally ambitious or complementary demanding careers. Of whom mommy approves, who makes you look slim or tall. Who can hold their own at the type of place they serve chilled champagne rather than warm prosecco. Whose parents bought a flat in Canary Wharf back in the noughties.

For the Shakespearean figures among us - the triple leos, the pisces with aquarius rising, the geminis with their moon in cancer - shackled with the emotional consistency of a stick of candy floss handed to a child in August, “stirring” might need to be added.

Someone who stirs you, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically.

That’s better.

I can’t decide if it’s lucky or tragic to discover how it feels when you find someone who covers all four. It’s so unlikely, it feels doomed.

I have friends who partner off with their resume equals. I don’t know if they are happy any more than I know if people whose goal is to live a comfortable and pleasant life are happy. They probably enjoy feeling settled. They hope death finds them peacefully, in old age, in their sleep.

But if you are wired beyond the mean, for pain as much as ecstasy, then it is is a miracle really, that your idiot genes made it to modernity. Penicilin couldn’t come fast enough for restless souls.

You think you made your peace, but then you meet someone who feels like a psyop designed by your enemies to weaken you.

They have features and mannerisms unremarkable to a neutral observer who is happily not subjected to the flood of hormones goading your own meat suit.

It’s as if your enemies barged into your childhood home and snatched the family album, documented the most thumbed YA novels in your bedroom and hacked into your high school social media accounts for evidence of what your heart imprinted on before your adult self had the chance to build its walls up.

Is she a Mark Darcy or Daniel Cleaver kind of gal? Were the men in her family gentle? Were the women insane? Did she dream of dying in a war or diving into a crowd that wouldn’t drop her?

This is how I know not to trust the rationalists, the utilitarians and the effective altruists.

They take partner finding very seriously indeed. They assemble Excel sheets and employ reason and foresight to map out their life. If you want to have kids you need this, if you want an impactful career you need that!

Enough you nerd emperors, you data fascists.

You will never understand the desire to be kneecapped by a honey trap that dog whistles to your inner child and shadow shelf.

When my screen lights with his name, my phantom tail wiggles.