From Roastie to Reliable: A Sociosexual Memoir
The stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas always puts a little mist in my eyes, so I’m poasting something personal. This is the story of how I memed myself into a serious relationship after a book convinced me to date with intention. In this secular, rootless milieu, we all need to craft our own babushka wisdom and build ties that anchor us to something greater.
After all, an effective, ethical racism practice starts with supporting your biological family. Race, after all, is just an extremely extended family. My boyfriend, who loves praising black male athletes (while I studiously avoid calling them ‘men’), stays deeply involved in his family's daily affairs. Meanwhile, I stay mostly detached. So who's the more effective racist here? Clearly, I have a lot to learn about living up to my ideals.
Superficial qualities like looks and money matter less for long-term relationship success than people think they do because lust fades and people adapt to their circumstances. The same goes for shared hobbies and similar personalities. A great long-term partner is loyal, kind, and emotionally stable, a person with whom you can grow, make hard decisions, and fight constructively.
Three years ago, I would not have been able to rationalize what I thought was a fundamental difference in values—on such essential questions as whether Ke’Bryan Hayes or Kyren Paris qualify as Elite Human Capital. Today, I recognize stronger foundations for a relationship in questions like: is he trustworthy and reliable? But knowing what matters in a partner also meant confronting what mattered in myself.
What Happens After The Wine Bar?
In psychometric terms, I measure high on sociosexuality.1 In digital street language, this is like being a roastie with a complicated past. But the COVID lockdowns gave me time to think, so I reflected on death and the ghastly half-life of degenerate behavior. Celibacy came easier than expected, and as my life stabilized, I tread a new path out of the dirt. I grew more reliable, more conscientious—and, frankly, more marriageable.
Did I really change, or become who I always was? My ‘diverse’ social circle knelt at the altar of black-coded norms. They preached that sexual restraint was futile, repressive, even a little white. Inhibitions were not chill; they were cop shit. Or, even worse for the rep—“sounds like someone can’t pull!” Yet I could not avert my eyes as the eternal party girls aged into something haunting: isolated, searching, empty.
Let's say you go on a hundred first dates. You might develop excellent first-date skills. You discover the perfect cozy wine bar. Or you perfect the story of that time you got lost backpacking in Nepal. But what happens on dates five through seven? Or date twenty-five? Or fifty-five? You don't know, because you haven't gotten there. […] You'll lack the experience of truly getting to know someone, of seeing the face of the person you love lit up by birthday candles or streaked with tears because of a parent's illness.
From your mid-twenties, one type of intelligence—fluid, the ability to solve puzzles on the fly—begins its rapid decline. In contrast, crystallized intelligence keeps climbing, layering hate facts across a bell curve, plotting a beautiful chart. So why fight aging with a thousand wine bar dates when I could lean into the compound interest of time—the shorthand of shared glances, an arsenal of inside jokes, a million shared sunsets?
No Points for Pain
Before the one I’m in now, none of my romances lasted more than a year. I had a weakness for men wracked by anxiety. In a textbook “anxious-avoidant loop”, I excelled at keeping my distance and fiercely guarding my independence; they excelled at wielding threats—suicide, self-harm, whatever it took—to demand closeness. The result drained my bank account and torched my connections with others.
Dating is a bit like stand-up comedy […] They’re both an audience-based art. Comics often say that if they’re at home coming up with jokes, that’s just writing. It’s not until they’re front of a crowd that they’re truly performing stand-up. Stand-up comics know that no one brings the house down the first time they stand up to the mic; they need to learn by doing. That’s one of the reasons up-and-coming comedians work so hard to get stage time.
A story I told myself was that all this adversity made me a survivor. I grew up in an intensely stressful, violent environment where couples stuck together. Divorce was unthinkable. To me, a relationship was about endurance and loyalty. Yet, I had friends whose stable romances were maddeningly mild-mannered and pleasant. Leafing through The Five Love Languages, I wondered if love was something you could hack.
One snowy morning in a long-gone bookstore, I plucked a book off the shelf that would change my life: How to Not Die Alone by Logan Ury. A Jewess and Google behavioral economist dispensing data-driven strategies for algorithmic love? “That’s so you,” my friend joked. I couldn’t put the book down. “Intentional love,” Ury proclaims, “asks you to view your love life as a series of choices rather than accidents.”
Love in the Time of Benchmarks
Mass-market dating advice is training wheels for the emotionally stunted. Podcasts like Call Her Daddy fixate on boundaries and ultimatums, but playing hardball just scorches the earth where trust might grow. Lucky for those with Latina cunning, but softer souls need deeper soil. True intimacy demands risking the unbearable—pride, independence, and those glittering “what-if” futures that dance just out of reach.
But what’s really on the table is the long game—biological clocks,2 embryo selection, and separating ‘nice-to-haves’ from ‘must-haves.’ Cartoons Hate Her converges on this same point as Ury in “Date Short Men”. While height wasn’t on my ‘checklist’ (back when I thought in those terms) I won’t deny the appeal of a tall frame. Still, I chose my short king and will Trust The Science to load the genetic dice for the next generation.
To determine your dating window, count the number of years from when you started dating to when you’d like to enter a long-term relationship. Now, what’s 37 percent of that number? Add that to the age when you started dating. That’s your 37 percent mark. If you’re in your thirties, you’ve probably already passed it. […] you likely already have enough data to generate a reasonable, well-informed benchmark. You do not need more research. The next time you meet someone whom you like as much or more than that benchmark, commit to them.
Some passionate romantics will find this life strategy sterile and disgusting. Dmitry warns that Spreadsheet Brain degrades one to a “shadow-puppet existence”; Nina Power decries the Moderate Man as lacking heroism and masculinity. I admire both these writers, but I cannot live their lives. A German once called every great philosophy “a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”, and so I lay bare my own.
Chaos leaves its mark. Each child takes his own lesson from touching the stove, much like the East Indian and African children choosing between restraint and indulgence, respectively, in Trinidad’s famous Marshmallow Test. For the proverbial Asian in us all, self-denial promises something greater—a million sunsets instead of just a single bite. Yet sometimes, I catch myself staring at that luscious, chewy treat, and I wonder.
‘Promiscuity’ refers to behavior only, while ‘sociosexuality’ is a broader term that also includes attitudes and desires toward casual sex, even if those desires aren’t acted upon.
Gamete quality also declines for men, regardless of health. Freeze your sperm ASAP.