on finding alice

because to be seen is to be recognized, and to be known is to be loved

7 min readOct 11, 2026

..and what other movie can better encapsulate today’s topic?!

reference: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice
pic source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DXHqlb6jLBs/

i once wrote about how reading someone’s writings is the closest you can get to their soul, and recently i came across this writing that beautifully explained one way of recognizing “the one” — that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. essayist Henrik Karlsson wrote this piece about how he found someone like Johanna, his now-wife, how he felt like she was his person — aka Alice, paying a homage to Gertrude Stein.

it’s a simple notion that once you recognize someone who makes you feel alive and seen, who rewires your brain, you should act on that rare connection by speedrunning authenticity. that we’re all born with this innate, unique “weirdness” that not a lot of people may get, but our alice would.

in this modern day and age, there are a lot of discussions and think pieces around what to look for in a partner, and even frameworks on how could you tell that they’re the one™. i’d argue that this is both a blessing and a curse because in the past it was so much simpler to decide on a partner based on happenstances and circumstances (lack of options/technology, geographical limit, different societal norms- the list goes on), but today’s writing is not about that. i also want to highlight that as we can approach this topic through a lot of perspectives (you should marry your type, compatibility matters more than chemistry, create a checklist of non-negotiable — yes, these frameworks help), there’s probably no right and wrong. at the end of the day, “when you know, you know” is a nice concept and yet so abstract you’d wanna scream “but i don’t know!!!” on top of your lungs at some point.

i believe knowing if someone is an alice is not just about having so much in common you’d have endless topics or like good at small talks. it’s being able to know the deepest parts of yourself, meeting your soul for probably almost the first time, through someone else, through this person.

so who’s your “Alice™”, he argued?

1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours,
2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and
3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.

no 1 might be a bit blurry if you’re an ultra extrovert or naturally a great conversationalist who’s easily fascinated by people in general. but i think it can be distinctive, cause it’s not about never running out of topics or alice being someone with a breadth of knowledge (or a walking encyclopedia?!), but rather being intrigued with every version of one’s self, legit admiring the way their brain works and the way they evolve every day. the way they live their life. and do you know how hard it is to find that? to have someone whose voice and talking speed you enjoy (i personally watch videos on 1.25x speed sometimes ykno?!), someone who have the same preferences (call over text, for example). not to mention they have to be someone who can speak the language(s) you’re comfortable in, switching if needed, someone who has roughly the same literacy level (and preferably similarly chronically online if you need that ?) so you don’t have to explain yourself; someone that doesn’t give you the irk when they have a different way of texting/typing things (petty, I know). someone you don’t have to translate your soul too, who speaks your language (not just english — figuratively).

for no 2, while grief is deeply personal, having someone to help you navigate difficult moments is one of the greatest blessings in life. they need to know your soul to be able to know and differentiate the exact moment to leave you be, to step in, to say the right words you didn’t know you needed to hear. it’s someone who has enough empathy, someone who’s a safe place, whom you know would never judge you or worse, leave you on a random wednesday knowing you’re going through tough times.

no 3 — i think your alice should be someone who helps you become the best version of yourself. the version you liked the most and probably didn’t know existed. talking to someone literally releases a mix of brain chemicals and i’d like to think that with an alice, the intimacy of the chemistry probably even alters your brain chemistry, and you come out as a new person. you’d be surprised at how much of an open book you could be and you learn new things about yourself from their lens.

dotoevsky’s white nights, also karlsson’s inspo

choosing a partner is choosing your companion — your banter partner, your devil’s advocate, your unpaid in-house therapist. especially if you believe in the institution of marriage — you’re basically choosing someone you’d talk with for the rest of your life to navigate whatever seasons come. everything else will fade, things change, kids grow up, and then what? you’d only have each other. i think in a world where we outsource portions, if not most, of our thinking process (i mean, i send voice notes to my AI to ask them to do things when i am too lazy to type), it’s beautiful to want to hear someone’s thoughts and even live in them. (like hey, these are the abstract thoughts i have, do you find them fascinating? i’d love to hear yours.)

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Karlsson also said:

You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see.
You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.
You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do it.
But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.

i’d like to think that talking to your alice is a lot like being able to turn your brain off during the conversation. you wouldn’t even have to think about what to say. you’d enter a flow state, you don’t have to worry about whether you might say the wrong things. you’d recall the most remote memories of your childhood from the nooks and crannies of your brain. your eyes might even light up too. everyone could be a yapper if they meet their alice, i think. meeting your alice would probably be electric. you feel like you won’t get enough of the way their silly little lovely brain works, you need their opinion on everything.

but i think the question is not how many alice(s) you can meet, but if you can keep one.

kalrsson said that you can’t afford not talking to alice, so I’d imagine that if you stop talking to an alice, it’d feel a lot like emptiness. that you still have all these thoughts running rapidly but no one to pour them to. not really no one, no, cause it’s easy to find someone to talk to, but no, it won’t be the same like talking to alice. i don’t know which one’s worse — to have never met your alice, or to have met your alice and having to live with their absence.

perhaps finding alice is not about looking for someone who checks every box. and maybe finding them is only half the story. the other half is choosing each other, again and again, even when life gets loud, when conversations turn difficult, when the novelty wears off.

so just remember if you have had LOTS of these before..

/i’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
/you get me
/i can’t wait to talk to you
/tell me all about it
/i think, x1000…

or the feelings of not wanting the convo to end and wondering where all these thoughts have been from the deepest corners of your brains or the stories you never got to tell but flowed ever so effortlessly,

i hope that means you met your alice, and you get to keep them :)