Mouse-over for most recent xkcd:

A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.

The last eighteen months of breadth-first dating arose from starting to understand how meeting a ‘nice girl’ was not the solution. Ironically, just yesterday, a friend said to me, “if only I could just meet a nice guy.” I wasn’t sure where to start. On the surface, I’ve come full circle recently, except that it was not a circle I did not learn from. I’ve had at least two conversations over the last couple of days with friends about passion, and the difficulty of finding a strong woman with passion who isn’t defiantly strong; afraid of love or empathy or denouncing feelings. Who is also nice. Now, I’m not asking for wonders per se, we’re not talking about the perfect individual. This is surely a farce, but rather a special blend. Each trait would be struggling for the top and one would find it difficult to keep them perfectly balanced in the long term. As it should be.

I saw a random online dating profile recently where someone described themselves as being passionate, but it came off as defensive. My first analogy is that it was like saying “I’m not short, I’m vertically challenged,” but with less humor. Like, I’m not ditzy, I’m passionate. I still struggle with describing the personality that I read into here. I think for this person it was a cover for leaping without looking, not being that smart, but being somewhat loud and overbearing about something. Is my passion then calculated? Perhaps. When I think about the tone of my advocacy efforts, about how I am often not being as outwardly fair about all sides of an issue as I am inside, I’d have to agree. I recall talking to J about how happy I was listening to M talk about what she believed in. There was a shadow or a veil of embarrassment or humility there over her passion but I could empathize with her passion. I was proud and loved that.

J once told me she believed that this sort of breadth first dating made a lot of sense because it would be difficult for me to find a partner who thought as much as I did about relationships and was as passionate as I am. I think I have been in agreement the last few months both mentally and emotionally, which is important. Still, it is a balance that wavers. Further, I am in the midst of a huge tidal shift of priorities as sobriety has left a lot behind on the beachhead.