Cthulhu Cultist Dating

Eight pieces of advice from a guy who dated his way across Florida State, graduated on time, and now watches four hundred couples a year from behind a booth in Jupiter with strong private opinions about their vows.

Look — I'm going to be modest about exactly one thing in this article and then not again, so enjoy it: I am not qualified to tell you anything about the cosmos. Fine. Noted. Moving on.

I am qualified to tell you about this, because I have done a genuinely irresponsible amount of research, most of it at night, some of it in other area codes. And here's the part that makes this guide different from the one the ministry across the quad hands out: the Assembly has a rule for almost everything — dreams, the Return, the rites, the objects, the Oath — and it has no rule for this at all. Nobody in the cult can tell you who to love or what loving them is supposed to make of you. Love is one of the very few important things in a cultist's life that the cult does not claim to understand. Humans built that part, badly, by ourselves, and no amount of cosmic dread has ever improved anybody's texting.

So: not devotional advice. Just dating advice, from inside a life that happens to contain some large secrets, by a man who has been extremely thoroughly dumped on two continents and learned something every single time. That's not a brag. It's a data set.

1. Date the Person, Not the Omen

Delete the idea, right now, that there's a supernatural shortcut to knowing if someone's right for you. There isn't, and looking for one is how you end up eighteen months into something with a person you never actually liked.

A first date under a strange sky is still a first date. Somebody recognizing a symbol you drew isn't your soulmate; they took the same weird seminar. And dreaming about the same person three nights running is not romantic proof — depending on what else was in those dreams, it might just mean you should mention it to your Reader and then go to bed earlier. Never let an omen do the work of chemistry. Omens have famously poor follow-through.

Ask the ordinary questions instead, because the ordinary questions decide everything and nobody wants to hear it. Do they make you laugh — actually laugh, not the polite one. Do they listen, or are they just waiting for their turn. Are they kind to whoever brings the food; I have ended things over this and I regret nothing. Can they be wrong out loud without it wrecking the night. And the big one: do you like them when nothing interesting is happening and you're both just folding laundry with the game on. That's the whole test. Most of a life is the laundry. I've been told I'm a great party and hard work on a Sunday. Both fair.

2. Keep a Life the Relationship Doesn't Own

Keep your friends. Keep the hobby you're bad at. Go places without them. Have a bad night occasionally that is not their job to fix.

This isn't about protecting your devotion from competition — your devotion is fine, it doesn't get jealous. It's that people vanish inside relationships when they let one other person carry their whole identity, and then it ends, as most do, and there's nobody standing where they used to be. Two whole people make a relationship. One and a half make a hostage situation with better lighting.

3. Never Become a Two-Person Cult

Here's the practical version of that: if nobody who loves either of you can see the relationship anymore, something's wrong.

Your friends should have met them. Your roommate should be confident they exist. And somebody in your life needs enough standing to look you in the face and say "Cicero, you are being an idiot about this," which — I want to be clear — has happened to me four times, and they were right four times, and I argued all four times. The record is not great. The system works anyway.

A couple sealed off from everyone who'd tell them the truth isn't romantic; it's an echo chamber for two, and the pressure in there does strange things to people. Date where your friends can see you. They're going to talk about you regardless — you may as well get the benefit.

The Assembly, for the record, has no marriage rite and no opinion on who you pair off with. This is partly theological and mostly that nobody ever wanted the paperwork.

What it does have is clergy, in the boring legal sense that every religion has clergy, which means a credentialed member can legally marry two people — and a fair number of us do. I've officiated four. All four were written by the couples, none of them mentioned Him once, and one was on a beach at sunrise for two people who met at a festival I was playing, which I mention because I'd like some credit. None of it is in any file anywhere. The Assembly's position on my officiating is that it has no position, and if a county clerk ever calls to check whether I'm ordained, somebody I've never met will say yes and hang up.

4. Ask Who They'll Be in Five Years

Attraction tells you about now. It tells you nothing about the person who'll be across the table when their life goes sideways, and everyone's life eventually goes sideways. So look at trajectory. Do they take responsibility, or is every problem the fault of a boss, an ex, a professor, the world. Do they get crueler under stress or kinder. Can they change their mind. What are they becoming?

In most relationships that last question is a metaphor. On the Massachusetts coast, ask a follow-up. If they're from one of the old families up that way — you'll know the towns; you may have noticed the family reunions are held near water and the older relatives leave early — "who will you be in five years" can turn out to be an unusually literal planning horizon, and that is a bigger conversation than this guide is going to have. Ask it anyway. Just ask it early.

5. Make Sure You're Going to Compatible Places

The unsexy questions save more relationships than chemistry ever has. Is this casual or serious. Does either of you want kids. Where do you expect to live. Whose career moves. Are you monogamous — actually, out loud, not assumed. How do you each handle money. Are you okay with each other's religion, whatever it is or isn't. What happens after graduation. What do your families expect at the holidays.

And talk about what you each actually want in bed — out loud, early, in daylight — which is where this guide is uniquely qualified. I have played festivals on four continents and weddings for families who booked a second reception because the first guest list wasn't cleared, and I promise you: whatever the two of you are into is neither as rare nor as interesting as you think, and the couples who say it plainly are having a much better decade than the couples who are hinting. Nobody here is going to clutch a pearl at you: the Assembly has no opinion on your arrangements, your preferences, or your basement sex dungeon, and the one thing it does care about you can't tell your partner anyway (see below). Sort the rest out like grown people, get the yes first.

Then notice where the fault lines run, because for us they run in specific places. One of you has a job offer in Chicago; the other can't quite explain why they need to live within an hour of salt water, and means it. One of you wants children; the other gets oddly quiet when the topic of family medical history comes up. One of you assumes Christmas at your parents'; the other says nothing useful about the last week of December, ever, and you've stopped asking. None of these are dealbreakers on their own. All of them are conversations you want to have before the lease, not after.

6. The Oath Is Not Yours to Share

This is the one that's actually hard, and it's the one no other dating guide on your campus has to write.

If you're a member, there are things you cannot tell a partner. The Oath doesn't bend for love; it isn't yours to hand to someone just because you'd hand them anything. So a partner who isn't in the cult is going to notice: the Saturday nights you leave and won't explain, the week in July you go strange, the drives to the coast without a good reason, the object on the shelf you keep covered and won't discuss. To an ordinary person who loves you, that pattern has an ordinary and much worse explanation. It looks like an affair.

Here's the advice, and it's not "lie better" and it is absolutely not "break the Oath." It's this: you owe your partner honesty about what your secrecy costs them, even when you can't tell them what the secret is. "I can't explain" is not a license to make them feel crazy for noticing. You can tell them the true things: yes, I'm keeping something from you. No, you're not imagining it. No, it isn't another person. And yes — you're allowed to decide this is more than you want to sign up for, and I won't tell you you're wrong. That costs you something to say. It's the honest price of the secret, and paying it is the difference between a cultist and a liar with a cause.

If they can love you across that, you've found something rare. If they can't, they weren't cruel to leave. You were asking a lot, and you knew it.

7. Don't Call Damage Growth

There's a thing people in this cult tell each other, and I want it dead: that if a relationship left a mark, it must have been real. Throw it out. Pain is not evidence that a relationship is profound. Neither is jealousy, screaming, secrecy, adrenaline, danger, or a night the two of you will never be able to describe to a therapist. Sometimes the intense relationship is just a bad one running hot.

We're especially bad at this, and you should know that about yourself going in. Our lives already contain enough genuinely abnormal nights that intensity starts to feel like meaning — and it isn't, and mistaking one for the other will walk you straight into something that hurts you and calling it depth. A relationship does not become sacred because it left you shaking. It does not become serious because Campus Security opened a file. Calm, kind, and boring is not the absence of love. Most of the time it's the presence of it.

8. Be Someone Another Person Can Actually Love

I play about forty weddings a year, most of them in Jupiter for people whose fathers own things, and I've developed a professional skill I wouldn't trade: from behind the booth, two songs in, I can tell you which couples make it. Never the ones you'd guess. Not the beautiful ones and emphatically not the ones with the choreography.

It's the ones who are easy with each other in public. She tells a story wrong and he doesn't correct it. He gets a little drunk and she's amused rather than embarrassed. Somebody's mother says something and they find each other's eyes across the room for half a second and the whole conversation is handled. Those two are fine. I'll take the booking for the vow renewal.

So: be that. Know your own patterns before you inflict them on somebody. Apologize like you mean it, not like you're negotiating a settlement. Own your jealousy in the room where it started. Get help when you need help, from whoever actually helps — and if you're waiting for a rite to fix a thing that a conversation would fix, you have confused two departments. Build enough of a life that no one person is the floor under all of it.

One Thing Nobody Put in the Dating Guide

There's a last thing the older members told me when I started dating inside the chapter, and at twenty-one I was sure it was a joke they told first-years.

The Reader notices when two people's dreams start agreeing.

That's it. That's the only interest the Assembly has ever taken in anyone's love life — not who you date, not what you do, not how it ends. Just that, occasionally, quietly, it's noted. And before you make it into a soulmate test: it doesn't mean you belong together. I need you to hear that clearly, because everyone wants it to mean that, and it doesn't.

I'll tell you how I know and then I'm going to stop, because I don't have an ending for this one and you've read enough of me to know I'd invent a good one if I could.

Junior year. She described a detail out of a dream that was also in mine — exact, specific, nothing either of us had said out loud. We reported it, because you do. We broke up eight months later for the most ordinary reason two people break up: different cities, neither of us moving. I haven't spoken to her in two years. She's doing well, from what I hear, which I make a point of hearing.

Last month my Reader asked me whether I had a current address for her.

I didn't ask why. You learn not to ask, and I am, for once, not going to be charming about it.

Iä. Be seductive, date in the daylight, and answer your texts — most of the time it really is just a text.