I Was Wrong About the Special Move

A married woman wrote in to tell me that the entire premise of my last article was wrong.

Cis-het women, she argued, do not need a special move in the conventional sense. Their special move is to notice the giver’s, train it in real time with feedback, and reward accuracy with audible enjoyment. The receiver’s special move is the system around the giver’s special move.

She also disclosed, in the same message, that she runs an anonymous Substack cataloging the special moves of partners past, so that future partners can replicate them, cutting onboarding time from the standard two-to-three tries down to something more efficient. She floated the term “special move pirate” for herself, which I think is generous. I would have said venture capitalist.

This message arrived several months after I published what I considered a reasonably thorough treatment of the special move. It was not thorough. It was barely a first draft.

Below is the correction.

Back in November, before my 25th birthday, Danielle tasked me with finding my special move or being cursed to a life of special-movelessness, on the theory that most of our friends who have one found it by 25, and the rest never will.

Since then: the article went semi-viral, Danielle directed a large portion of her audience toward it, and I have been getting weekly DMs ever since from people proclaiming in confidence their special moves, their questions, or their general thoughts on the matter. Some came back months later to leave a revised opinion. A few went to my website and privately emailed me their feedback, which I appreciate, even though I did not ask for it on company letterhead.

If you asked me, when I first wrote that article, whether there would be a follow-up, I would have told you you were insane. That the first one made the light of day is already beyond me. But with engagement like this, who am I to argue with the market.

When I published the original piece, I believed four things, all of which turn out to be at least partially false:

That a person gets exactly one special move. That if you don’t find one by 25, you never will. That special moves are discovered, not inherited. That the ones you have, you keep for life.

None of this survived contact with the comment section.

1. Moves accrue over a lifetime

The data — and I am using “data” with as much generosity as the word can hold — suggests that most people find their first move by 25, acquire another around 35, and pick up another by 50. By their 70s most respondents have five or six primary moves in rotation, though some of the more cardio-based ones have, understandably, fallen off.

One reader confessed to five, maybe six “that would be hard to replicate,” and noted that his most devastating one is heavily cardio-dependent. He is refining it now, in his twenties, with full awareness that he is building on a depreciating asset and bracing for the day his cardio gives out and he has to adapt. Sobering.

A bisexual reader claimed he gets to put two on his resume, a straight one and a gay one, which raises a whole separate question about whether special moves are demographic-specific or universally portable, and which I am not equipped to answer.

The best framing of multiplicity I have received to date came from a reader who proposed thinking of special moves like desserts. You can have three, but you can’t have them all the time, and you can’t have them simultaneously — too sweet. The right one depends on the mood.

The takeaway: the one-move thesis is dead. The 25 deadline is more of a starter pistol than a final whistle, which I find personally encouraging.

2. Some are inherited

In the original piece I posed a nature-versus-nurture question and offered no answer. Several readers wrote in with one.

Inherited moves exist. A family special move, taught from one generation to the next, requiring practice to master. This also undermines the one-move-per-person thesis, since it implies a family one and a self-taught one running in parallel.

The transmission also, for reasons no one was able to explain to me, tends to skip a generation. Roughly five readers reported being taught by an uncle or a grandfather, who gathered the younger cousins together around age 13 and walked them through it all at once. I am simply reporting what the data showed.

The most fully realized version of this came from a reader who was taught at 17 by his grandfather, who had learned it from his own father-in-law, an illustrious kabbalist from Baghdad. The lesson was delivered through esoteric readings of certain medieval texts. Two of his cousins sat in on the same session. They did not pick anything up. He was the only one who could read between the lines. His grandfather never confirmed or denied that a lesson had occurred. They never spoke of it openly afterward, only in hints. The same reader noted that moves passed down as secret family transmissions tend to follow a slow learning curve that eventually surpasses self-discovered ones. Patience, he said. Practice.

My family did not do this. I am not sure if I should be thanking them for sparing me, or quietly furious that I either come from a long line of people who were holding out on their grandchildren, or, worse, a long line of people who had nothing to pass down in the first place. I cannot decide which is more insulting.

3. Almost everyone has one

This was the most surprising finding, and the one I should have predicted. Even readers who declined to disclose what their move actually was would, when pressed, admit they had one. Universality across the dataset.

A subgenre also emerged in which a reader would disclose their move and then immediately attach a disclaimer — please delete this if it is too much, or a lengthy preamble about how they had never told anyone this before. It is okay, guys. Have your special moves with your chest in the comment section of my blog. It is safe with me.

One reader DMed me, “I have a special move, but I’m not sure you could handle the information.” We have been negotiating a share-for-share trade for several months. I keep making whole articles about this online. If I cannot be trusted with this information at this point, then who can. After two whole articles on the topic, I think you could say I am a trusted expert in the space.

Another disclosed that he had once executed a move so effective that the recipient told him the feeling was “so intense it was almost painful, but it felt so good that I forced myself to endure the pain.” He reports this made him feel like he had magical powers. It is also possible this is just another case of straight-man hubris. It really is hard to tell from a DM.

Special moves people were willing to publicly attribute to themselves:

Ear stuff (though the contributor would no longer call it his, as he fears it has become too mainstream recently). Peeing on them. Throwing them against a wall and slowly walking over menacingly. Something to do with ice cream. The rest were submitted off the record, which I am honoring against my will. Go read the comments for yourself. I cannot, in good faith, transcribe some of them here.

4. Shelf life

The finding I had not anticipated at all: some moves have a shelf life and some are evergreen. Some scale with age, some do not.

This changes the calculus considerably. If you are picking — and many of us are still picking, if “picking” is the right verb for something that is supposedly revealed to you by god one day — you might want to consider the asset’s durability. A move that requires being 24 and uninjured is a different investment than a move you can deploy at 60 in a kitchen. Ideally I would have both. The cardio one for now. The kitchen one for later. Diversified portfolio. Maybe I should be specifically trying to pick one that does not require being especially nimble, so it scales with age. Something to think about.

Which brings us back to the woman who started this whole correction. Her argument complicates the entire ontology of the project. Is a special move a thing one does, or a system one is part of? Are we measuring the wrong unit? Do receivers have hidden meta-moves that we have been failing to count for the entirety of the literature?

I think the honest answer is that I have been counting only half the field. Every move I have catalogued in this article and the last belongs to the giver. Every receiver I spoke to who claimed not to have one was, on reflection, almost certainly running a meta-move they had not bothered to name, because nobody had asked. The married woman asked herself, and then she told me, and now I am telling you.

This is a much larger research project than I initially scoped.

There were some questions about the rigor of the methodology, to which I will say: I am a single woman posting on a blog and asking a subset of strangers to respond in the comments and then crowdsourcing the results. This is roughly the epistemic standard of an Aella survey minus the sample size and the budget. If anyone wants to fund a more controlled study — Bryan Johnson, Aella, some unholy collaboration between the two — I am available. I will need a lab. I will need IRB approval. I will need, at minimum, a research assistant whose entire job is fielding the DMs.

In the absence of funding I will continue to do this in the comments, for free, like a fool.

I am aware that I have not, in any of this, disclosed whether I located my own.

I will tell you what I told Danielle: the 25 deadline came, and it went, and she has not asked about it since, which I am taking as either tacit acceptance or quiet disappointment. The new data suggests I have a developmental window opening around 35 and another around 50, which gives me roughly 25 years of runway before I have to face the prospect of being genuinely, terminally moveless. This is, frankly, more time than I had a year ago. I will take it.

Or, possibly, I have found one, and in the tradition of my best commenters, I am declining to disclose. You will never know. I am taking it to my grave, or to my paid Substack tier, whichever pays better.

In the meantime, as one reader put it, I appear to be becoming the magneto of special moves, evolving my readership into a kind of x-men. Into sexmen, ideally.

Please keep the submissions coming in the comments. I have had the most fun time reading them, and definitely not texting them to people I have had relations with asking if they could try that (I mean what). Until next time, dear reader.