hans.gerwitz

What really matters for mutual under­standing of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, senti­men­tality, audacity, ambition, compet­i­tiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of person­ality, char­acter, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.

…It is these sorts of aspects, these innermost aspects of a soul (as opposed to such rela­tively objective and trans­ferable items as coun­tries visited, novels read, cuisines mastered, historical facts known, and so forth) that make for soul-​​uniqueness.

Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 235

Shannon and I are engaged!

Reactions have run the gamut from “already?” to “finally!” To us it seems not a dramatic event, but rather a formal social recog­nition of inter­twined person­al­ities. Just before proposing I was asked whether I was nervous, and realized that I simply was not. I now under­stand how natural a rela­tionship can be. Instead of social oblig­ation or lifestyle, I am moti­vated by enthu­siasm for today and the future.