Isn’t it mysterious how the universe works? Every now and then, it drops a beautiful glitch into the matrix of routine human interaction. You meet someone, usually in a completely unexpected setting, and within twenty minutes the standard social script feels completely absurd. You skip the preamble. The “So…what do you do?”. The transactional banter. Instead, the conversation gravitates around topics you wouldn’t ever imagine exploring with a stranger. Or topics well-worn from a thousand repetitions, but this time filtered through their perspective, it’s like looking at them from one dimension above the one you’re used to. It uncovers an approach you never thought possible.

A terrifying sense of absolute synchronicity.

It feels less like meeting a stranger and more like recovering a piece of your own mind that had been left in another room.

We’ve been told this is a romantic cliché, the myth of “the one”. The soulmate. And subsequently, because of our own deeply hidden and shameful hope for love, we’re told to reject it, for it is just that: a tale. But if you strip away the Hollywood glitter, the actual phenomenon is something much rarer. Much colder. Far more demanding; it is a crisis of mutual, extreme curiosity.

In one of my favourite essays “Looking for Alice”, which I still read religiously every few months, Henrik Karlsson frames this connection through the lens of a “shared world” constructed entirely out of sustained, relentless attention. A connection that is so generative, it helps you become. Scarily, he notes that the number of people on Earth with whom you can build this specific type of wildly generative architecture is vanishingly small - perhaps ten thousand people in total, scattered unevenly across the globe. “The number is small enough that you can’t afford to be casual about it,” Karlsson warns. “You have to never let someone like that pass you by.”

The best representation of this kind of intellectual archaeology would be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (just as its sequel, Before Midnight, serves as the most accurate portrait of modern relationships). When Jesse and Celine meet on the train and decide to walk through Vienna together, we could hardly call their conversation “flirting”. Their dialogue doesn’t loop, it builds. They are performing a high-speed excavation of the other’s soul that shifts the very physics of how they understand themselves.

(Fascination, St. Stephansplatz, Vienna, 1990, Kent Miles)

Now, I spend my days analysing the physical brain (usually in rodents, but I’m allowed to make a parallel here). So, when this happens, as much as I wish I believed in a cosmic/karmic alignment of the universe intentionally bringing two souls together, I’m more inclined to assume it isn’t magic. But it is the exquisite biological dance known as neural coupling. When two people genuinely understand one another, their separate nervous systems fall into rhythm and the listener’s brain waves begin to mirror the speaker’s with millisecond precision. In a way predicting the other’s internal states in real-time and acting as a single, cohesive circuit.

But biology only explains the mechanics of the bridge. Not why we choose to burn it down.

Because the true tragedy of human relationships is that most people end up running away from their Alice and straight into the arms of - perfectly boring - comfort.

The Weight of the Mirror

To truly understand why people settle for relationships that offer zero synchronicity, let’s look past psychology and step into philosophy. A concept elegantly introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche, the Übermensch, describes the individual who possesses the supreme willpower to overcome the limitations of the self and to discard societal scripts. To constantly evolve toward their ideal potential (the Overman). The opposite of this ideal is what Nietzsche called the Last Man. The Last Man is a creature of pure comfort. He avoids struggle, loathes friction, and seeks only a quiet, predictable, surface-level existence.

To know your ideal self, to look into the mirror of a true “soulmate” (if I may) and see exactly who you could become, can be an agonizing experience. It requires a brutal honesty. It forces you to realize how far you are standing from your own potential.

And if we are committed to embodying our own Übermensch, a real soulmate would trigger our Selbstüberwindung, our self-overcoming. Not by inventing a new version of us. But by being a master sculptor, looking at us like a rough block of marble, and using their extreme curiosity to slowly carve away the excess stone until our ideal self is revealed.

But sculpting hurts and so the Michelangelo Phenomenon miserably fails before it even begins. Because growth requires friction. Which is unfortunately where the willpower of the average person breaks.

(Edward Hopper - Room in New York, 1932)

The Last Man of Romance

The people that lack the willpower and fear staying in a relationship that mirrors back their true selves, will inevitably choose to shrink their values to match their current, lazy behaviours. They will opt for the path of least resistance. They will choose a partner who doesn’t see them, because a partner who doesn’t see you will never demand that you grow. They will settle for a relationship of low stakes and soft edges in order to soothe their ego. They will become the Last Man of romance, mistaking the lack of friction for peace.

And eventually, you might try to delude yourself by calling the act of lowering your standards a necessary “compromise.” But the uncomfortable truth is that it is a quiet act of cowardice toward your own potential.

I have, therefore, made up my mind. My stance on this is unyielding: It is infinitely better to face the reality of romantic aloneness than to occupy a bed with someone who is not your Alice.

To choose loneliness over a mediocre attachment is a statement that you possess the spiritual toughness to wait in the stillness rather than accept a reflection that degrades your ideal self. So make no mistake - if you allow yourself to be casual about who you share your internal syntax with, you aren’t just giving up on the idea of a deeply meaningful relationship.

You are giving up on your own Übermensch.

Further resources

Looking for Alice - Henrik Karlsson

Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), directed by Richard Linklater

Rusbult, C. E., Finkel, E. J., & Kumashiro, M. (2009). ‘The Michelangelo Phenomenon’. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6), 305–309.

Nietzsche, F. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, Section 5, if you’re interested in the architecture and hazards of the ‘Last Man’)

You sit in your living room. It feels familiar, yet the sun filters through in a way you don’t quite recollect. The person in front of you keeps talking as if nothing is wrong, and yet something just doesn’t add up. You look over their shoulder and notice the colour on the walls, the one you chose many years ago and have seen every day since, feels off. Ever so slightly, but enough to unsettle you.
You try to anchor yourself to what you’re certain to be true, but reality keeps slipping and replacing itself with something almost identical.

The person stands up and walks into the kitchen - when they come back with a glass of water in their hand, it isn’t their face anymore.

You freeze and wait for the world to correct itself.

It doesn’t.

The Father, released in 2020, remains one of the most anxiety-inducing films I’ve ever had to sit through. A claustrophobic experience. It doesn’t allow you to be an observer, it pulls you in and forces you to experience the sheer confusion and panic as Anthony (Hopkins) slowly loses his grasp on reality.

It also came out around the same time my grandmother started developing dementia. At first, it was repeated questions, stories told twice in the same conversation, keys put in the freezer. Slowly the gaps widened, time lost its shape. She’s now almost completely non-verbal and bedridden, with a sense of identity that’s difficult to trace.

Looking back at it now, this film is probably what pushed me into neuroscience research. It gave me a kind of dictionary for what I was witnessing and a way of making sense of what she might be going through.

We’ve all heard about Alzheimer’s to some degree, the “forgetting disease.” Dementia is only a symptom of it and unless you have a reason to look into it more deeply, i.e. watching a loved family member slowly wither into an abyss because of it, it is easy to assume that forgetfulness is the core of it.

The reality of the disease is very different. Not just the biological side, for which there are plenty of resources, but the lived experience.

The Anxiety of the Slight Shift

At first the changes are subtle. So subtle that you’re not even sure they’re real. Many patients describe moments when the world as they know it stops making sense for a heartbeat. You’re driving down a familiar road, a task you’ve completed thousands of times and should feel automatic, when suddenly you don’t know what comes next. The usual landmarks, your local gas station, the pine tree, the turn sign, are gone and have been replaced by generic shapes.

You feel like you’re drifting off the edge of Earth. Like standing in your kitchen holding a spatula, but the kitchen feels like a movie set and you can’t remember why you’re holding a piece of plastic.

This stage is especially difficult because of how invisible it can be to the people around you, making it all the more unsettling for you. To everyone else, you mostly look normal. You compensate, maybe take a bit more time to reply or repeat things here and there. If you’ve spent your life building a cognitive reserve - a kind of structural resilience the brain develops through years of education, complex work, or mental curiosity - you can hide it well enough that even you start to question whether anything is wrong. That makes you even more anxious and even causes out-of-character “anger spells”.

Eventually the changes become more and more difficult to ignore.

(Self Portraits by William Utermohlen, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1995. This series captures the progression of the disease.)

Melting Clock

The disease progresses and now it’s not just your memory that begins to break down, but your trust in your perception altogether.

Imagine time is no longer a straight line. It feels like a deck of cards that’s scattered across your kitchen table. One moment you’re waiting for the kettle to whistle, and the next moment you’re queuing at the bank wondering how you got there.

You look outside your window and it’s suddenly dark; you’re not sure if you’ve eaten or if you’ve been sitting in your favourite chair for five minutes or five hours. The present moment becomes an island that’s constantly shrinking.

Faces are also slowly losing their meaning now. Sometimes it just takes you extra time to connect the name to a familiar smile. Soon enough, those you love start becoming unrecognisable. Their features turn into blurred watercolours with no names attached to them. Maybe you smile back because it feels safe, you can’t let the outside world know that your internal map is turning white. But inside, your heart is pounding against your ribs. You start following the people most familiar to you around the house, because if they leave your sight their faces might change.

The Person of the Senses

You’ve made it into the late stages of dementia. You’ve moved way beyond “misplacing” keys and “forgetting” names. The complex tools you’ve been cultivating throughout your life and using to navigate reality - logic, reasoning, language – are disappearing. At this final stage, the brain has stripped away everything back to its primal functions.

The world is no longer understood through them, but solely felt through your senses. Tone of voice. Touch. Light. Presence. You may not be able to name the person in front of you, even if that’s your own reflection in the mirror, but you still respond to how they make you feel. Just as my grandma is no longer a person of words or “history”; she’s a person of the coldness of a spoon, the roughness of the sheets, and the frequency of a familiar voice.

To reach her, I have to step into her world. I can’t use an old anecdote to connect with her. But I can hold her hand because she might like the warmth, and I can sing to her because she might like the calming tone.

The Question

If you’re experiencing this from the outside, from the perspective of having to witness someone go through these stages, it’s natural to ask yourself the following question.

Is the person still there?

It almost arises automatically, when the person who raised you looks back at you with the blank stare of a stranger.

But maybe that’s the wrong question to ask. We attribute identity based on memories, shared jokes, predictable behaviors. When these are gone, we perceive the person as absent. What if this definition of “self” is too narrow? If we strip away the “biographical self”, the person we built throughout the years based on memories, names, dates, stories we tell at parties, is there not a “biological self” that remains?

I don’t know what dementia feels like from the inside, no one really does. Especially in its later stages. But if we can take anything from it, maybe it’s this:

The self is not as stable as we think it is. When it shifts, what remains is not nothing, just something harder to define. A different state of being. Maybe even one still worth living for. Because perhaps on this sensory island, this simplistic way of perceiving the world retains a subjective value that we cannot measure.

If we accept the person in front of us has changed and we stop waiting for the world to correct itself back to how it used to be, we might find that love doesn’t require a reliable narrator to be real.

References and further resources

The Father, 2020, directed by Florian Zeller.

Still Alice, 2007, novel by Lisa Genova.

Extended Interview with Alzheimer’s Patient, Don Hayen, video by KPBS Public Media.

The later stage of dementia, Alzheimer’s Society.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985, book by Oliver Sacks.

Clifford, K., Moreno, M., & Kloske, C. M. (2024). Navigating late-stage dementia: A perspective from the Alzheimer's Association.