One Last Month of Second Person

A new job, a blog that's concluding, and a book that's taking shape.

Two years ago, Visa challenged his mutuals to explain their book in a single page. I have never written a book or had any particular plans to do so, but I had one page’s worth of ideas about dating and agency. I typed it up and tweeted it.

Soon after, I got an email from a literary agent who asked if I was planning to write more than one page on the topic. Since she asked, of course I was! I spent several months putting together a 16,000-word chapter outline to pitch to publishers.

The agent told me that the market wants books with “concrete steps to help readers”, not vague attempts to orient them towards self-directed action. She said that good books explain one perspective a dozen times, and that my inclination of adopting a dozen perspectives on the same problem is a better fit for a collection of essays than a longform book. She said she will not be pitching Dating Other People¹ to publishers.

At that moment, I swore an oath of venge… just kidding, I thought she made some good points and thanked her for the feedback. A friend who liked my writing suggested I do a Substack first and offered a generous investment in the project. I launched Second Person on September 27th, 2024.

I plan to conclude Second Person by September 26th, 2025 with four more essays after this one. The immediate impetus is that I have accepted an offer to work full time as a writer. I thought I could continue Second Person alongside a job in ops or product, by writing posts in my head throughout the week. I’ve written Putanumonit in parallel to a finance job that didn’t involve much writing or idle thinking about new topics. But I don’t think I’ll have the motivation or ideation capacity to write something good about dating alongside a demanding writing job.

To my readers, I want to say: thank you, and it’s all your fault. One year ago, I had no idea if my writing was good enough for people to pay to read it regularly. Most of Putanumonit was one-off topics, as were the few articles I sold to magazines. Second Person was my first attempt to become obsessed with a single question for more than two weeks at a time. I discovered that I enjoyed the tighter focus, that I got better (hopefully) at thinking and writing about dating over time, and that you were willing to come back every week for it. You gave me the audacity to pitch myself as a writer and the proof that I could do it. One extremely exciting company² was convinced.

Please stop sending me your money! I’ll attempt to pause all subscription renewals before 9/26 and set a yearly option for new readers who discover Second Person and want to read the paywalled archives. You should downgrade to a free subscription by the end of the month just in case I mess it up. If you’re a paid sub and want access the archives going forward, just email me and I’ll extend your subscription for free for the next year. And if you’re a founding member, you might receive something else in your inbox sometime in the next few years.

Book in a Page

The other reason to wrap up Second Person is that I have said most of what I had to say about the question that launched it: why don’t people do anything about getting the relationship they want? I’ve turned almost everything that was in my original book pitch into posts, except for the parts that were dumb. Some of my best posts contain ideas I didn’t even grasp when I wrote the pitch, insights I got from reading a dozen books and talking to dozens of friends throughout the year.

But recently, the pace of new insights I get about dating and relationships has slowed down considerably. I’ve mostly arrived at the coherent framework that the book agent correctly pointed out was missing a year ago. I even have a list of concrete steps for readers to actually move their romantic lives forward. I’m more excited to organize my existing thoughts into a book, whenever I find the opportunity to do so, than to keep trying to come up with something new and unexpected every week.

So, two years later, here’s my second attempt at explaining the book I haven’t written yet but totally will one of these days in a single page:

• Why do people who demonstrate agency in pursuit of money, prestige, and success often show so little agency in dating? For most things in life, what matters is what you’ve done. But in dating, what matters is who you are.

• We hate this. We want a fair outcome for fair effort, like grades at school or payment for work. People react to the unfairness of dating either by adopting some flavor of fatalism (ranging from inceldom to soulmateitis), or by demanding to be told what to do.

• They look to advice books, credentialed authorities, socially enforced rules. When this frustrates them, they buy socially acceptable highly credentialed advice books that tell them to do nothing at all.

• This doesn’t help, and people become resentful. Dating discourse offers an endless supply of ready culprits and generally exists to prevent you from finding relationships. Unlocking romance requires purging your mind of antiromantic memes.

• Discourse infects you with grievances against the opposite sex. Understanding the struggles and predicaments of the opposite sex is the medicine. For women, it’s understanding that men must somehow learn to read minds, take risks, and initiate action in a society that suppresses and punishes male agency. For men, that women must walk a tightrope between male gaze and female judgment, between their own volatile power and unreliable desire.

• The other key insight is that love isn’t transactional, but dating is a market that matches supply and demand. You want to narrow both down to a single person who wants what you alone offer. Someone who needs your unique talents and complements your unique faults, not just someone equally fuckable.

• Back to what’s important: who you are. This isn’t some ineffable essence, a question to investigate at a remove, or a curated story you tell people. It’s a matter of deliberate practice, of having goals that you pursue with integrity, of incremental progress from being a nobody to becoming somebody.

• The key skill is commitment: sacrifice of optionality and dedication to action. Commitment to your dating role, to becoming the person you set out to be, to what your partner needs and who they set out to be with you.

• It takes a while to learn commitment, but once you do the fog lifts and the path of your dating life stretches clear ahead. Once you sharpen who you are and start acting on it, you’ll keep moving forward through success and failure both. Let go of what holds you back, and step forth.

Unlike my first speculative attempt, every link above points to an essay I’ve already written. If you’ve read every one, I’ve probably taken you as far as I could. Godspeed!

1. I’m grateful to my wife and my friend Skye who convinced me that “Dating Other People” sounds like a a blog about cheating so I changed it to “Second Person”.

2. I don’t want to disclose my employer until I actually start and they publish something I wrote.