Dating : They Remember Everything About You, Even the Small Details

They Remember Everything About You, Even the Small Details

A few years ago, I remember I spent an entire evening on the phone with one of my best friends, Nadia. She needed to talk as she was struggling in her relationship. She had doubts about her girlfriend’s feelings, and our conversation ended up being an analysis of her behaviors.

A few days later, they broke up.

We’ve all gone through this at least once. Scratching our head, asking ourselves if our partner is really into us as they say or not — only to realize later that our intuition was somehow right.

Let’s be honest, when someone truly loves you, they don’t let you wonder. They don’t send mixed signals. In fact, the opposite is true. Their actions speak louder than their words, and they show their love through their actions rather than just telling you they love you.

They consistently do small things they usually wouldn’t do for other people, which, when combined, are a good indicator someone genuinely cares.

Nadia is now in a healthy, fulfilling relationship with her new girlfriend, Sandra. And she says she feels a huge difference with her previous relationship.

Anytime she needs to talk, Sandra is there to listen. She knows she has her emotional support and that she’s not a burden for her. If Sandra sees Nadia isn’t in her best mood, she asks her if she needs to go for a walk and vent. Her ex, instead, seemed to never have time for that.

Someone who doesn’t love you won’t be interested in spending time listening to your problems; they will have other priorities. Those who love you instead want to do something if they see you are struggling.

I can’t stress this enough,

Be with someone who can’t wait to spend time with you.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

If someone loves you, they will feel the need to see you, and you will notice it. You won’t have to wait one month before seeing them — unless you are in a long-distance relationship, that’s an entirely different story.

When Nadia and Sandra started dating, they met once or twice a week, and they couldn’t wait to see each other again. Nadia never felt insecure about Sandra’s interest because she could feel she was genuinely into her.

Then, after a few months, when the relationship started to become more serious, and they became exclusive, they slowly began to see each other three or four days per week. Now, after two years, they live together. Things slowly and naturally progressed in a loving, healthy relationship.

Of course, as I explained a few weeks ago, time apart is essential to relationship health as well. You don’t want to spend your whole time with someone, no matter how much you love each other.

You must make enough time to pursue your dreams and focus on your hobbies or career. In fact, time apart is exactly what makes you long for the other person, and makes your moments together memorable.

If someone loves you, they want you to be happy with them. Whenever you two have a disagreement, they will focus on handling the conflict and sorting things out.

This is what Nadia noticed from the beginning of the relationship. When she had her first disagreement with Sandra, they treated it as an opportunity to get to understand each other and grow as a couple. And Sandra asked Nadia how she could be a better partner.

If someone doesn’t truly care, they will perceive relationship talks as a waste of time. Instead, someone who loves you will make communication a top priority because they want things to work.

Let’s be honest, when you are in love with someone, you want the world to know you two are together. In particular, you want your loved ones to know it, and you can’t wait to introduce them to your significant other.

An example of this is when Sandra introduced Nadia to her family. She organized a dinner at her place after two months they were dating, and she couldn’t wait to do so. The same happened with her closest friends.

Someone who doesn’t care won’t feel the need to introduce you to their family or best friends. They won’t feel the need to talk to them about you. In fact, they might even avoid it.

Another sign someone is in love with you is they not only introduce you to their family and friends, but they are also curious to meet your loved ones. They probably won’t pressure you into it, but they will communicate their interest in knowing them.

And they will make an effort to get along with them. For example, the first time Sandra met Nadia’s parents, she cooked a meal for them. Then, she spent the entire afternoon talking with them. They had a long, pleasant conversation.

The same thing happened when Nadia met Sandra’s family, she invited them to her small lake cottage, and they had a nice barbecue. They had a lovely day together.

After a few dates, Sandra remembered the earrings Nadia was wearing the first time they met. And Nadia remembered when Sandra shared her fear of bees during their first date.

Someone who is not into you won’t even notice the small details. If someone loves you instead, they will impress you with their memory. They will remember almost every tiny detail of your first dates and how you two met.

Those who care about us tend to remember a lot of what we say and what we do.

If someone doesn’t love you, they won’t feel the need to help you.

Someone who loves you instead will want to alleviate at least a bit of your stress if they can. They will show their love through their actions — especially if their primary love language is “acts of service.”

For example, when Nadia had to move to her new apartment, Sandra helped her with the move. When she had to buy a new sofa, she offered to accompany her to Ikea to choose one and then helped her organize the transportation.

Another small sign someone is in love with you is they talk about the past — your past as a couple. Most likely, they will do it a lot, and with a smile on their face. Because they not only love you, but they also love the memories you have together.

Last year, for Nadia’s birthday, instead of a birthday card, Sandra created a video with at least one hundred pictures of them. I found it an original and romantic way to remember their past as a couple and collect their memories together.

Someone who doesn’t genuinely care won’t think much about the beautiful moments you spent together, because they don’t place the same value as you do on them.

As someone who loves you talks about the past, they will also mention the future a lot — your future together. When they make plans, they always include you, because it feels natural to them to see you in their future. Not only that, but they also have thousands of ideas of things you can do together.

They will mention a movie they want to watch with you, a concert they want to go to with you, a country they want to visit with you, or even the house they want to live in with you.

For example, Sandra talks a lot about long-term plans with Nadia. She often mentions her dream house she wants to buy one day — to live there with Nadia — and the caravan she wants to buy — to travel with her.

True love looks and feels like this. You know and feel the other person is there for you and sees you as part of their life — today and tomorrow.

You won’t find yourself wondering if they are into you or not. You won’t spend hours analyzing their behavior with your friends.

You will know they genuinely care.

2020 was a great year for me — this little annoyance of a global pandemic aside. I moved out of the city, have five months left at my job, automated my life, sit here now with an uncertain future and all the freedom I could wish for.
Life’s a tumble, but overall I kind of like it — and having the mind space that automation affords me plays a great role in that. So here is what I automated this year to save me hours of time, effort, menial work.
I automated my automations
The most important thing that I did in 2020 was to go one step further and made sure to run all my scripts at system startup. Having automations is nice and all, but if you still need to click the script, worse even need to navigate through the console and run a python script you end up wasting time — and more importantly you waste mind-space.
And it is all so easy, all you need is a single .bat file that contains a couple lines like this: start “pathtofile.py/.bat/.exe” “parameters” “you may” “need”.
Then place that file into your autostart folder — or better still: Have it in your Google drive folder and just place a shortcut to it on every device you use.
Most scripts do not take a long time to run, or they can easily run in the background on modern computers. For example I have a whole bunch of Selenium automations that can run “headless”, meaning that they are invisible and you can keep working like normal, just with slightly reduced power.
On my desktop computer I do not even notice a slow-down when I get to work even though my scripts take the first five or ten minutes to run — it is just a no-brainer that saves me a lot of time and mental capacity. Set things up once, keep running everything automatically ever after.
I set up a content creation pipeline
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Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash
Now to get to the first real automation: An automated content creation pipeline. What this does for me is to keep all my writing projects organized, set them up, structure them and back them up — and that all took just an afternoon to set up.
I use a Trello board as my main contact point, each time I add a new card with a post title I trigger a zapier job that will create a text file in Google Drive for me. Depending on the board the subfolder will be different, but they are all part of my Git project that I use to save all my writing files. Just place that git repository inside your Google Drive and the new files will be automatically added to your change list, that is very convenient.
The text file is already named like my Trello card, then I have a Python script that creates a subfolder of the same name and moves the .txt file inside, renames it to Markdown format (great for writing and sharing!) and puts the title as the first line with a headline Markdown notation for me.
As you can probably tell this already saves me a great deal of time for every single post that I create — at least five to ten minutes of super annoying, menial work. It also allows me to place all images directly with the post inside that subfolder — plus I know that I never forget to turn an idea into a project skeleton.
The more I write, the more useful this becomes — and as I said it only took me a lazy afternoon to figure out and set up so I am already deep in the profit zone on that.
I automated my statistics and generated a daily monitoring report
If you are like me you have a lot of different things going on — something new and shiny always comes along. Checking stats is an important part of keeping track — but it costs a ton of time to do manually.
However it is very simple to automate the pulling of statistics using Python and Selenium — and now you can suddenly push them all to a daily spreadsheet, even send out an email to yourself so that you can read your stats on the train to work.
I automated (some) git repositories
I work between different devices a lot, either my main computer or my Microsoft Surface tablet. This works almost fluently using either Github or Google Drive — but I often found that I would bring my tablet out of the bag as the train sets off and realize that I forgot to push my changes from my desktop computer the night before. That is annoying, and it does not have to be like that — just automate the git commit / git push with a simple script that runs on a delayed endless loop.
This is not good if you collaborate on projects with others — but if, say you had an automated writing repository, one that you alone work on, then it makes no real sense to do proper commit messages. All I would ever write in there would be “did some writing yo” anyway.
So I just use a batch file that runs commit and push every ten minutes on that repo, that is enough to ensure that 99% of the time I am up to date on all my devices.
On system startup I run fetch and pull once, this is enough as I always shut down my devices when they are not in use.
I automated my finances
This automation step has nothing to do with regular programming — but man is it useful. I stopped having money issues after I stopped looking at my bank account some two years ago, that is not exaggerated. Sure, other parts play a role in that — but honestly this is an area where I save so much mind space by a “lack of knowledge” that it’s almost unreal. I pretty much live on a cash-only basis for all non-recurring cost, everything that I have to pay monthly is just automatically withdrawn.
My rent, internet, power and heating, water and insurances, retirement plan contributions — I do not care about any of those, I do not want to see them, hear them talk, whisper dark thoughts into my ears.
In the same way I automated my income as well, meaning that I automatically withdraw from paypal, payoneer, stripe or at least do that manually once a month with an automated reminder. Seriously Paypal, get your stuff together and make auto-withdraw a non-business-account feature. Anyway, all my direct income sources are also automated, from Patreon, Amazon Affiliate, Kindle, freelance sites — they all pay me in some way and in some way the money lands in my account.
I have literally not even glanced at my bank account this month and I do it maybe once every other month to check if something looks odd. So far this has served me well and saved me a lot of stress.
The great part here is that I am far from rich, but I can actually live like I don’t care about money anymore. I live cheap, healthy, happily and when I do need a 500€-per-mile taxi to get home when somebody threw furniture on the train tracks (again) I can just suck it up and spend the money more or less without worry.
All my images get optimized for web automatically
Image handling, editing, uploading — they all are a huge waste of time that I would rather not deal with. I like the “Instagram filter” approach to image editing where you click through a couple options, choose the one you like best and call it a day. Chances are you won’t try to win a picture contest when all you do is upload an image to a blog post on your website.
However this last part is where you will feel the effects of improper image sizing and a lack of optimization — your average 8mb smartphone image is at least eight times larger than it has to be. Your page loads (much) slower, your site gets penalized by google, people on mobile connections will see their bandwidth being eaten up — all for no reason.
So I just run a python script over my images folder that automatically optimizes and renames every image that does not have a file name starting with “optimized_”. This is seriously quick to run even over whole folders containing large amounts of images — and if you just upload a handful of images a day or a week you won’t even notice it.
Of course I revert to the first point here and have this script run automatically whenever my computer starts — and since I keep all my images synched in google drive I just need to run it recursively over a single folder. You can choose to create a backup of each image, I don’t. I know it works flawlessly, has pretty much no possible source of errors and if I ever need to Google Drive has a rudimentary version control to step back to an earlier version.
I automated my postal deliveries
You know what really costs a lot of time? Waiting for postal services to deliver my monk halloween costume that was such a smart financial decision this month.
I am so glad that these delivery boxes exist here in Germany now, that has made everything so much simpler, streamlined, comfortable for everyone. I’m sure the delivery folks live just as fine without talking to me and I can take my bicycle at midnight to get my package if I feel like it.
It’s such a great invention and it works flawlessly. You get automated texts when something is delivered, if you have a job without homeoffice work you save a full vacation day on every single delivery — it’s just great.
Living in a small town now I rely on deliveries for any non-standard goods and this system pays for itself the first or second time that you use it.
Summary: You can automate a lot of things in your life and save hours over the course of the year.
I hope this post could showcase some optimization and automation potential in a pretty regular life — and that is still only scratching the surface. This becomes even more true when you look at semi-automation like for example finding an easy way to quickly sort through emails and push them into folders. I could see a system like the Tumblr app where you long-press a button on your phone and a little circle menu opens with all your blogs under that account, then you swipe to one and the email gets added there.
With something like that you can save a lot of time on tasks that can not be fully automated — another great example is anything you can do with AutoHotkey scripts.
This whole post was written using my autocorrection script and I saved at least an hour on this post alone by typing much quicker, having it correct all my typos and expand custom abbreviations into full words, thereby saving me time and strain on my fingers.