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The Weird Question I Asked Every Man I Dated
What we ask before we know what we’re really asking
When I was 23 and meeting someone new, I had a question I was always asking. Something I asked to figure out whether this person was worth knowing better.
Had they ever taken psychedelics?
I know. Stay with me.
My mind was already plenty wild, and I wasn’t looking to blow it open any further, so I never did psychedelics. But whether someone else had, that mattered to me enormously at the time, and I could not have fully explained why.
My now husband had. He was 24. That was, genuinely, a turn on.
We have children now. Neither of us has time for psychedelics. Looking back from here, it makes me laugh. But it also makes me curious about what I was actually sensing for.
What the question was really asking
I wasn’t vetting for drug use. I was vetting for a particular kind of person.
Someone willing to have their mind blown open. Someone curious enough to go to uncomfortable, disorienting, humbling places voluntarily. Someone who had looked at ordinary reality and thought, "What else is there?” and then actually gone looking.
