my love language is curiosity

+ how to make someone a playlist

I feel perpetually misunderstood in a lot of the spaces I occupy. I know I play a role in it because I rarely try to correct people’s false perceptions of me. I kind of just let anyone think whatever they want, make a mental note, and move on. But in the rare cases where someone makes me feel like they actually get it, my inner child is doing backflips.

It takes effort to truly get to know someone outside of your own projections, and it takes vulnerability to allow somebody to. It’s rare to find someone who loves you enough to take the extra time and energy to understand you, truly, without inserting their own experiences. To care enough about someone to ask questions, study their patterns, and listen with an open heart and mind is the highest form of intimacy.

For as long as I can remember, I have been annoyingly inquisitive about the world around me, specifically about people. I want to know people deeply. I want to know what they care about, what moves them, what they find funny, how they listen to music, what their apartment looks like, what their current hyper-fixation is.

Every empathetic good listener has met plenty of people who are perfectly ok talking about themselves for an entire evening and never asking a single question back. This has been a common experience for me, and I’m mostly cool with it because I genuinely like to learn about people, so I’m okay with holding space for that. The issues arose when they later confessed how close they felt to me, how strong they felt our connection was, or how they felt we were destined to be in a committed partnership. Not only did I rarely reciprocate those feelings, but I was offended that somebody who barely knew me and didn’t care to ask me anything about myself assumed that the feeling would be mutual. I could very well be a serial killer, or worse, have bad music taste. And you wouldn’t even know because you didn’t bother to ask, but somehow we’re soulmates?

Because I’m cursed with an endless quest for self awareness, I obviously meticulously assessed the role that I play in this dynamic, because it kept showing up. I don’t really talk about myself unless asked directly. I was a victim of the “who asked” era in middle school, where anything I said would be hit with a “who asked?” or “did I ask?” — and yes it was funny, I laughed too, but it also taught me not to leave space for anyone to ask that. I still struggle to volunteer information about myself, it can take me a while to open up, and I will revoke anyone’s personality privileges if they make me feel misunderstood. Yet part of me longs to feel truly known.

There’s so much intimacy in making the effort to get to know someone deeply. This doesn’t always include trauma dumping, it can be as simple as asking someone what they’ve learned recently, what they’re currently excited about, what they yearn for, or what they would do if they were randomly gifted a lump sum of cash. I like to ask people about their taste in music, selfishly because music is one of my biggest passions and I want to assess our compatibility, but also because it’s really interesting to know what people like and why. I pay attention to how people listen to music, if they resonate with lyrics or melodies more, if they point out small details in the production, or if they talk about how a song “feels”. These are all details I consider in a relationship or friendship before we get to second base (making them their first playlist).

Making a playlist for someone, if approached correctly, can be a testament of how you see them. When I approach playlist curation, I look at it from one of three lenses, with increasing levels of intimacy: 1. I just want to send them a list of songs that remind me of them from an energetic/auric standpoint 2. I want to express a particular emotion to them 3. I want to put them on to new music based off of what they already like which I have carefully studied over a period of time.

The third approach takes time, listening, attentiveness. It means that every time I’ve heard you comment on a part of any particular song, I’ve taken mental note, which sounds something like: “Ok, they like weird bass lines,” “they’re drawn to unique vocalists,” “they value vulnerable lyricists,” “they gravitate towards songs that feel like you’re floating.” I imagine Spotify’s algorithm is something like this too, but mine is probably slightly better just based off the fact that I’m a human with synesthesia who pays way too much attention to just about every type of music that’s ever been created ever.

When someone sends me a song, film, or book recommendation that I end up really liking, it holds more significance knowing that it came from someone who studied my taste and came back with proof.

To be loved is not just to be seen or considered, but to be seen and considered as the ever-evolving, multi-dimensional, complex individual you are. To be constantly met over and over again as you grow and change and face different challenges that force you into different versions of yourself. To be gifted a playlist for every iteration of you.