I recently started a document, now called “what I like”. It mostly includes things from observations, imagination, and values. Here’s each section, and a small sample of the items for each section:

• Mandatory: wants to have children and raise them Catholic
• Likely necessary traits: can comfort our children, doesn’t complain about people in a way that needs to not happen in my relationship
• Love languages: she doesn’t rely too much on giving me gifts
• Perceived traits or actions that have made me feel something or have interested me after I noticed them: confident passionate speaking in presentations and debates, shows laughter or excitement in response to something I do or make, often has big smile, silently waving to me, welcoming towards me, staying in pew to pray when others aren’t, being curious about me
• Other signs of good match for me in particular (mostly imagination of what complementarity would look like): seeks my thoughts, explains things in my mind that I can’t explain, inspires me to pursue something, our humor fits together and we enjoy each other’s humor
• Things that should be acted on in a big and complementary way: imagination, curiosity, excellencism
• Things we should be able to enjoy together: creativity
• Miscellaneous

It will probably help with having a more certain and accurately scaled perception. It could resist the confirmation bias caused by the appeal of the idea that my search for someone good enough for me is easy or already finished.

To be clear, this is not the entire process of figuring out what to look for. These lists are mostly unfiltered, except I don’t feel like writing about most of my physical attraction mostly because that would be boring. The whole thing should not be used as a checklist, and it should keep on evolving. It is an additional input to intuition.

There’s now also separate documents about some people with a few other specific observations. For example, in the one about the girl I’ve likely been most obsessed with (I was prematurely committed to someone else and/or in denial until it was too late), I included memories of her speaking with perfect confidence and the way she laughed when I said “Pretty Places by _, more like Porta Potties by _” (honestly I included this one so she knows this is about her if she sees this post). I could have avoided regret by quickly paying more attention to my vague feeling about her and trying more to have fun.

My search for my future wife might benefit from also writing about platonic friends.

This kind of activity will likely be part of the Pansystellar Architecture.