Shadowing Practice: the dating advice that changed my life - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I was 16 the first time I thought I was in love.
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It was the kind of love that lived mostly in the stomach.
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Giddy, embarrassed, half laughing at itself.
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I didn't know yet what love was supposed to be back
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when it was raw and unadulterated and allowed to just be whatever you wanted it to be.
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That was before the word got tarnished.
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Before movies and TV and think pieces and TikTok therapists decided what love was supposed to look like.
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Somewhere after that, love became a set of instructions.
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Wait three months.
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Don't text first.
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Don't text back.
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Leave before your left.
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Want, but not too much.
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I spent years listening.
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To friends, to strangers, to women on the internet who spoke about men like opponents to be outmaneuvered.
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And none of it ever sounded like the thing that I remembered.
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None of it ever sounded like love.
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met a boy and he introduced me to the series of essays Looking for Alice by Henrik Carlson
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and it might just be the best dating advice I have ever read.
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In 1862, Charles Darwin got a package in the mail.
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It was an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary, which is like the tube at the center of the flower, and the nectary was as long as his forearm.
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So he wrote a letter to his friend that said, good heavens, what insect can suck it?
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He figured that somewhere in Madagascar, there must exist a moth with a tongue long enough to reach the bottom of this flower,
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because the flower wouldn't have grown this long if something hadn't evolved alongside it.
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And he was right.
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They found the moth 40 years later.
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a lot about what we evolve for and whether we actually choose it or if we're just shaped by it.
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By the movies, by the sleepovers, by the songs that we would play on repeat at 19 and call it love.
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Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian.
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She said no. She just liked Alice, her partner.
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A specific woman, not a category, not a type, not women with strong opinions and good hair.
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Just...
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Alice and I read that and I thought about every single conversation
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that I had about what my type was six feet charismatic funny creative the type of extroverted introvert
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that matched my extroverted introvertedness We love to ask each other where types are
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and that's honestly probably like my favorite type of conversations have with the girls We're so good at this.
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We literally have entire vernaculars dedicated to this.
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He's a golden retriever boy.
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He's a doberman boy He's a finance bro, but he has like a soft heart, but all this is completely useless Not because your standards are too high,
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but because you're asking the wrong question.
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This is what Carlson says: "The reason so many people are miserable in dating isn't that they can't find their type, it's that they're thinking in types at all." You don't fall in love with a category.
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You fall in love with a specific, weird, particular human being.
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And those are not the same thing.
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Gertrude Stein didn't have a type.
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She had Alice.
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But how do you go about finding your Alice?
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You go and talk to a thousand people and see
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if there are any patterns and who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard.
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That's how you move from vague guesses to true recognition.
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Here's the math that should terrify you.
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Carlson estimates that there are maybe 10 ,000 people on this entire earth that you could live an extraordinary life with.
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10 ,000 out of 8 billion.
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So when you meet someone that completely rewires your brain, when conversation doesn't just flow but transform, when it feels less like you're talking but more like you're becoming,
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you can't afford to be casual about it.
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You cannot afford to play it cool when someone's weirdness matches your weirdness.
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Gertrude Stein didn't play it cool.
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She just liked Alice.
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Speedrun authenticity.
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There's a scene in this Werner Herzog documentary where he is filming a prison chaplain.
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And this prison chaplain is about to watch this young man die by lethal injection.
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And the chaplain, he's just giving these like stock answers, the Lord works in mysterious ways, we're all in God's hands.
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These are just lines that he's memorized and said over and over again.
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And Herzog, mid -interview, cuts him off and asks him.
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Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.
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The chaplain, he's confused, but he answers.
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He describes a real encounter that he had with a squirrel on a golf course, but within seconds, he is sobbing.
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Because no one has ever asked him that before.
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He had to actually think.
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and thinking cracked him open.
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And this is what you should be doing on dates.
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Not watching lethal injections, but asking questions.
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For me, the ideal first date is honestly just a long walk and a late night conversation.
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I think, I know some people love doing activity dates and they love having that like activity as a buffer,
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but for me, conversation is so crucial and so important to getting to know someone and getting to know, I just like want to know immediately if we're a good fit or not.
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And I think the fastest way to do that is through conversation.
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The fastest way to know if someone is right for you is to abandon the script entirely.
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Skip the small talk and jump straight into the weird stuff.
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Safe cafe conversations teach you nothing.
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Be honest, share the stuff that you usually edit out and see who clicks and who doesn't.
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Share the inside of your brain and see who wants to live there.
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Don't let the group decide.
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This is the last thing.
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Tolstoy writes about a man named Pierre who ends up marrying a woman named Helen
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because everyone at the party starts treating them like a couple.
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The hostesses seed them together, his friends get excited.
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Pierre himself isn't even sure he likes her, but the whole room seems to.
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So, he marries her.
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And it's a disaster.
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Carlson's read on this is
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that a lot of what we think is attraction to someone is actually just our friends' reaction to them.
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Your roommate frowns when you describe the quiet one, but your group chat loses its mind over the really hot one.
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And suddenly you can't figure out where your feelings end and where the group's begins.
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So here's a test: Would I still like this person if nobody in my life reacted to them at all?
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If your answer is less certain than you like, just notice that.
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You don't have to throw this person out, can't quite see yet.
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You see them because you're the moth, because you're evolved for something specific that no one else is looking for.
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When you tell your friends who you're dating, you're forced to compress this complex feeling to words and you flatten it.
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Great relationships are often very hard to explain.
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They don't fit the typical romantic tropes.
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They are wonderfully incomprehensible.
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Ultimately, the fundamental lesson here is that everyone is born with this complex interiority
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that is invisible to everyone else and to you initially as well.
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But through trial and error and experimentation, you get a better sense of how this space behaves.
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Then you can find someone whose inner world could fuse with yours in a way where A is impossible to break beforehand,
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B impossible to explain afterwards, and C completely transformative.
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So, you do all that, you stop dating your type, you speedrun the real stuff, you find someone who's weird clicks with your weird.
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Cool.
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But now what?
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This is where every piece of dating advice stops, and this is where the second essay begins.
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Act Two.
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Loving Alice.
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Dostoevsky as lover.
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There's a Soviet philosopher named Bakhtin who wrote a book about Dostoevsky.
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It has literally taken me months to finally be able to pronounce this
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and I still can barely pronounce it so bear with me guys.
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But his argument is interesting.
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He says Dostoevsky loved his characters.
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Carlson wrote, Dostoevsky treats his characters as if they were full human beings who own the final word about themselves.
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Dostoevsky refused to contain his characters inside his own ideas about them.
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He let them surprise him.
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He didn't write them as mouthpieces.
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And Carlson says, "That is exactly what loving another person is.
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Love is refusing to fit someone inside the box that you built for them.
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Because here's what we actually do: we meet someone, we fall for them, we spend the first six months collecting data, and then, slowly without realizing it, we stop collecting.
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We file them." I know that he reacts to this.
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I know she needs this when she's like that.
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I know that he's gonna say this before he says it.
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And we call that intimacy.
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But Bakhtin would say that's not intimacy.
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That's a caricature.
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You stopped loving the person and started managing your ideas of them.
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And the person is still in there.
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Growing, changing, becoming someone you haven't met yet.
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And you're not even looking.
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So the moment you go, yeah, I know him, you stopped.
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Carlson says real love is closer to prompt engineering.
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gonna say.
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You ask the weird question, you leave space, you let them unfold in directions you didn't predict.
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And they do the same for you.
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Here's a quote from his essay.
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A person can't be contained in your ideas about them.
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This was a core idea for us.
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To whatever extent I assumed I knew who Joanna was, Joanna's wife, I treated her as something that could fit in my head, as something smaller than me.
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But she couldn't fit in my head, nor I in hers.
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That was the exciting thing about it.
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You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue, if you treat them prize.
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Love is about being invested in someone's continual expansion.
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Thank you.
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If someone truly loves you, you will grow.
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You will become someone totally different than who you were when you first met them, and so will they.
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Which means a great relationship is not two people who stay compatible, it's two people who keep diverging but find ways to meet each other over and over and over again.
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They were pulling in different directions and he thought like are we becoming strangers?
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But the divergence was the point when she became someone he didn't fully expect She became this richer material.
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She gave him something to push against and he did the same for her.
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They weren't becoming strangers They were becoming more themselves
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because of each other I think the Instagram version of a
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good relationship is two people who become essentially the same person They mesh together into this one unit
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fully whatever they actually are.
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There's a line in the essay, and if you take nothing else from this video, take this line: He says, "We spoke each other into being." Not, "We fell in love." Not,
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"We found each other." We spoke each other into being.
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That's what the right relationship actually is.
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Not two finished people who found their match, but two unfinished people who keep making each other.
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Through conversation, through crisis, through the thousand small moments of being witnessed.
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into who they are now.
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You're not trying to find someone to love.
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You're trying to find someone you can become yourself with forever.
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So, go read the essays.
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They're called Looking for Alice Part 1, 2, and 3 by Henry Carlson.
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I link them below, read them in order, then text them to the person you're trying to figure out whether to be serious about.
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If they get it, you got your answer.
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Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you guys next time.
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Bye.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
This video offers an engaging exploration of love and personal relationships, making it an excellent resource for english speaking practice. The speaker reflects on their experiences, providing authentic dialogue that captures nuanced emotions. By focusing on such relatable topics, learners can enhance their ability to discuss complex subjects in English. Practicing with this video using the shadowing technique allows you to imitate natural speech patterns, improve fluency, and build confidence in articulating feelings and thoughts.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Throughout the transcript, several key grammatical structures and expressions stand out, which are useful for advanced learners:
- Present perfect tense: "I have ever read." This structure is effective in discussing experiences and connecting the past with the present.
- Modal verbs: "must exist," "might just be." These verbs enable you to express necessity and possibility in conversation, enriching your speech.
- Conditional sentences: "if something hadn't evolved." Using conditional structures helps in discussing hypothetical situations, which is paramount in discussions about personal feelings and relationships.
- Descriptive language: "specific, weird, particular human being." Incorporating vibrant descriptors into your vocabulary can help you convey your thoughts more vividly.
Practicing these structures during your shadow speaking sessions can greatly boost your conversational abilities.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While listening to the speaker, pay attention to the following tricky words and phrases that may challenge pronunciation:
- Unadulterated - Focus on the syllables and the rhythm of this word. Breaking it down can make it easier to pronounce: u-na-dul-te-ra-ted.
- Tarnished - The 'ar' sound can be difficult for non-native learners. Practice saying it slowly before combining it with the rest of the word.
- Charismatic - This word contains multiple syllables; ensuring each is articulated clearly is crucial for effective communication.
- Moth - The short 'o' sound can be misleading. Listening to native pronunciation will help you master this word.
Integrating these pronunciation strategies into your improve english pronunciation practice will significantly enhance your clarity and effectiveness in spoken English.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be outmaneuvered · is born · can't be contained |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | nectary, which is · friends who you · people who stay |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have ever read · has ever asked · haven't met |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.