The Omicron Criteria

A theory on compatibility based on vessi

In the end things must be as they are and have always been—the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

—Friedrich Nietzsche 

Introduction

We were friends long before the friendship began; we were lovers whilst still strangers; we spent all this time apart gathering experiences that would keep us together for as long as life or death permits.

This creed more or less summarizes my private theory of compatibility in a more poetic manner than which I lay bare in this article. I’ve had the notion for a while but haven’t quite been able to anneal the thought into words.

We form most relationships based on reasons more strange than we would normally confess to. I suspect this to be true between parents and children, siblings, lovers, friends and even enemies, too. What determines closeness between two people can be as simple as a favourite band or as sinister as suicide attempts separated by time and space. The rules are sometimes fragile, for good or for bad.

One thing though is certain, relationships are sustained by interactions—physical or virtual—that are based on near immutable aspects of ourselves.

As I’ve grown older, as I continue to grow, too, my hunger for stable relationships has doubled. In this fickle world, it is beautiful to have people—as well as places, interests, hobbies, and habits—who become safe spaces for one to experience, explore and become one’s self. Where the vicissitudes of life can induce anxiety, the devotion of one’s partners—romantic, platonic, or even guardians, too—can act as an anchor against the incessant uncertainty. Guarantee is goated, so to speak, and trust, with all its risks, when indulged in, liberates and makes room for growth and repair.

As an adult navigating capitalism, battling the occasional offhand nihilism that surfaces from time to time like a whale, relationships are indispensable. Over time, making new friends gets exhausting and keeping up with the old ones which we’ve outgrown takes the life out of us. Besides, the fact that we’re rarely in new spaces, due to settling in our careers or limited by low-level income, means meeting new people is out of the equation. Strangers become a myth only dispelled by the internet when they quote your tweet. Once you graduate, you’ll stop talking with two-thirds of your course mates, and, if you’re an introvert, joining a book club or going for picnics, parties, and plays might not be sustainable. And coupled with the fact that humans can be so inhumane, it is dangerous to attach too quickly to someone (romantically or platonically)—the brunt of it can send you spiralling into depression, or worse, ultimatums that isolate you and cage you in unaddressed, unhealed trauma.

What you need is a sure method to making friends and, hopefully, love partners.

While the factors that go into ensuring compatibility are numerous and indeed impossible to whittle into a few core traits, three things I’ve found to be consistent across the board are shared experiences, shared interests, and shared values.

This finding, I’m aware, can be co-opted as a blanket statement to mean all experiences, values and interests which you share with someone can be used to engineer compatibility, which is just one fallacy away from making one into a flat earth theorist.

For these three aspects to foster long-lasting compatibility, they must meet what I call the omicron criteria¹, which is composed of VESSI, an anagram of the initials SE (shared experiences), SI (shared interests), and SV (shared values).

A chart showing the isolated parts of the omicron criteria

Shared Experience 

When I look back on all my friendships which have lasted for years, they were made in moments of self-disclosure. We bonded over emotionally-charged confessions about depression, distaste for the educational system, or honest exasperation towards our overbearing parents. We had gone through similar struggles and, hence, felt seen, and, more importantly, understood. Empathy wasn’t a bridge built to foster safety but an inevitable outcome from our shared experience made more potent by the vulnerable nature of those confessions.

Opening up to the wrong person can blow up in your face, at worst, and further alienate us from them. When people have experienced the same things as you have, you don’t have to explain away your dark humour or offer immediate reassurance that you’re better now as a tactic to stave off pity. There’s no calibrated performance or need for one—you are your broken self, whom the others see as a fixed puzzle. You don’t feel like you’re oversharing. And, unless you find pleasure in revelling in other people’s shock, you might not have to go into full details, because they just get it. And nothing is more reassuring than not having to lay everything out, than being understood from less as opposed to being ostracised from divulging more.

However, these confessions have to be pivotal to your identity; they must’ve, in some way, altered either your worldview or your life in general. This should not be confused with a trauma bond, which is, roughly speaking, a relationship between an abuser and an abused sustained by manipulation tactics used by the abuser to keep the abused dependent on them. And trauma bonds are a stellar example of why you should be careful about who you open up to. Narcissists will use your confessions against you by setting you up for emotional attachment devoid of love.

*

One afternoon, after I got into an accident and emerged with only a few bruises, in the second cab I took to get home, I struck up a conversation with the guy seated in front with me. He was talking about the mangled car he’d seen close to the roundabout—I told him I’d been involved, explaining the situation to him. Moments later, he confessed to an accident he’d been involved in recently, too.

When the vehicle hit top speed, he said, the tyre spun out of its axle and sent their bus hurtling into the other lane: just before they crashed into an upcoming vehicle his life flashed before him and he thought he was dead.

We were strangers, but our shared experience made it easier for us to converse. While this works well for a one time conversation, more is required for a meaningful long-term relationship. For the omicron criteria to be met, two more aspects have to be explored.

Shared Interests 

What you love will often lead you to who you love. This is true for most people. Our interests—hobbies, pastimes, books, music, films, topics, subjects, ideas etc.—not only feature in our daily, weekly and monthly routines, but also shape us and account for who we are and, sometimes, who we become.

We’ve all seen prompts that go: Name a topic you can discuss for 40 minutes without break or polls asking for your unpopular on a niche topic. Interests are proof of similar intrigues; shared interests presuppose the path through which an intellect has grown towards, a personally cherished rabbit-hole which another person is also fond of. Nothing could be more flattering than its discovery.

True, most people who we’re compatible with have fully-developed, explored interests which we will never understand or try to at all. It’s normal. Where there is overlap, there is also bound to be an immutable difference that sparks no curiosity on our part. Consequently, too, not all shared interests strengthen bonds. For a shared interest to bring us closer to compatibility, it must be überspecific. 

Überspecificity is a scale that presumes the power of a shared interest based on the frequency and understanding people have on a rare aspect about something common, a common aspect about something rare, or a rare aspect about something rare. 

This might seem circular and confusing, but stay with me.

A rare aspect of something common 

Everything that’s common can be reduced to a niche that appeals to a select set of people. Also, in that niche exists another niche that appeals to an ever smaller sect. Let me break it down.

Interests, to a large extent, define our identities. It’s often difficult to wrangle one from the other. It matters whether we prefer books to movies, rock climbing to yoga, or if we have ballpoints we admire or YouTube channels that post the best ASMR videos on the planet. But the truth remains: you can always go from the general to the specific.

Let us take a common example like music. There’s classical, Japanese pop, math rock, Afrobeats, but we’ll pick American pop. There’s Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, John Legend, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, The Weekend, but let’s use Sia. 

She’s pretty popular; you’ve probably heard one of her songs before or recognize her signature black & white bob wig. If we strike a conversation as strangers and we’re talking about Sia, who is, for the purpose of this example, generic, I’m less inclined to pick interest in you. Even if we talk about her vocal dexterity and insane range. However, if we start talking about how one of her songs—bonus point for if we’re talking about the same song—helped us through a dark time, we are edging towards überspecificity because we’re combining self-disclosure to a very specific part of something which would otherwise be common or generic. We now have a story; and empathy is the heart of every good story. As a rule, when shared experience meets shared interest, überspecificity peaks and is more potent.

A common aspect of something rare

I’ll use a personal example this time. One of my favourite musicians is Hozier, which is uncommon, at least in Nigeria, to a certain degree. His music appeals to a certain kind of people: most of his fans are lesbians who have christened him, and I would agree, as the only straight man they’d marry. Now, if I meet someone who loves Hozier, my interests would leap by bounds, because Hozier is, for a number of reasons, special to me. In that moment their knowledge of Hozier on the scale of überspecificity is a common thing about something arguably rare.

After all, it’s a statistical possibility for another Nigerian to know him—his 2014 hit Take Me to Church has over a billion streams. Now, if you confess you like Hozier because of his lyrics, we’re getting closer to a core. If you like him for his humanitarian commitment to speak against oppression over gays or women by the patriarchy, then I love you. If you can relate to searching the meaning of his song lyrics on Rap Genius or watching YouTube videos of strangers trying to figure out the meaning to his songs just by paying attention to the lyrics, then we’ve lived the same life. If you’ve listened to all his albums and soundtracks he’s done for movies and video games; if you have gone feral for a random picture of his hair tied in a bun, then marry me already. By this point we’ve broken the überspecificity lever. The conversation would flow like water, because at this point, we can branch of into algorithmic possibilities like Florence-The-Machine, talk about Plato’s allegory of the cave, converse about the Irish sense of humour, about how Hozier’s mother often does most of his albums’ artwork; talk about gay rights, the dangers of choice feminism, the brilliance of Nina Simone, the myth of Icarus etc. etc. etc. The more common aspects of things we consider rare that we have in common, the more compatible we are. Obviously, we’ll disagree on some things, but on the whole, we’ll have pleasant interactions.

For others it might be Beyoncé’s excellence, Modern Family, Quentin Tarantino, Chimamanda Adichie, Gertrude Stein, Judith Butler, Toni Morrison; tennis, football, hockey—it doesn’t matter, as long as it speaks to you and you have acquired some weird knowledge about the person, book, film, sport or concept.

Take Nietzsche for example. Most people have heard the phrase, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Few people know Nietzche came up with the quote. Fewer people know he was chronically ill and almost always bedridden. Or that he broke down mentally at the sight of someone whipping a horse. Or that his book, The Will To Power, after being edited by his mother and sister, whom he hated and loathed in return, was used by Hitler to propagate Nazi ideology by co-opting his concept of the Übermench. Few people know he hated Richard Wagner, the German composer, whose music he loved at one point. Few people have read all his books or read counter critiques about his ideas. I, on the other hand, know these and more about him. If I come across someone who knows Nietzsche, as I have before, I will be impressed—it’s common, but it would be rare if the person knew as much as I did about the man, or was pivotal to them exploring atheism, or were introduced to the writing of La Rochefoucauld, the clever, french aphorist, through his work. 

A rare aspect of something rare

In the ’60s, scientists made a groundbreaking discovery about horseshoe crab blood: it could be used to identify trace levels of dangerous bacteria. Also referred to as a living fossil for existing over 450,000,000 years, a gallon of the horseshoe crab blood costs $60,000 and has led to a frantic scramble for them which threatens extinction—a fate which the dodo met when they were made extinct by Dutch soldiers on the island of Mauritius in the 1600s.

Now, there is an ongoing scandal in the biomedical industry about the horseshoe crabs, whose blood continues to be used by pharmaceutical companies to make sure our injections, vaccines, and surgical implants are all free of contamination.

This isn’t mainstream news or common information amongst my circle of friends, just as the fact that dragonflies are the most successful winged predators—compared to eagles and hawks—isn’t common information either.

The etymology for the word pen can be traced to quills, while that of pencils derives from the same Latin root word as penicillin and penis.

A Rupert’s drop is a paisley-shaped glass bead formed when molten glass is dripped into cold water, which creates a knobbed head that can withstand much stress from a hammer’s blow or being shot with a bullet and a tail that shatters the entire glass when the slightest force is applied to it. 

These are things my insatiable curiosity has led me towards. They’re not things most people around me know; and, if they do, we could have fascinating conversations about them.

In the same way, I’d be down to have conversations any day about Natalie Wynn, Mina Le or Khadija Mbowe—three of my favourite YouTubers on pop culture, feminism, and intersectionality.

These are interests of mine already high in überspecificity; I would imagine a life with someone who brings up such topics during a conversation or forwards links on such articles to me, too. 

For you, something different might cut it. It could be Tay Iwar or Cruel Santino; Paprika or An Elephant Sitting Still; an obscure Chilean writer or a feminist author from Botswana. These interests amalgamate your heart: your pupils balloon just at the mention of the subjects. You become like Chinese people who are marvelled or pretend to be shocked when a foreigner speaks their language fluently.

Shared Values

Maybe the most important of all three and the one which, once absent, negates the compatibility power and intimacy generated by the other two shared factors. If our interests are outcrops of our personality, then our values are windows into our character. It is necessary to vet people’s values more than any other aspect. Skipping this crucial part can have devastating consequences in the long run.

Values shape beliefs and attitudes, hence, despite the compatibility fostered by interests and experiences, values will ultimately be responsible for how others treat us and those around them. This can impact us negatively or positively depending on what the case may be.

True values aren’t abstract concepts which we rattle on and on or debate about. True values are embodied and mirrored in our actions and habits; they permeate our every interaction, no matter how miniscule.

Sure there are many values which you can vet a person on ranging from responsibility to discipline, and it can take forever to parse each and rank their importance.

However, I suggest that by investigating people’s religious, political and financial standing you can get to the core of their character. Shared values should be non-negotiable, identity affirming, and only subject to change after an extensive review or a colossal emotional event on the other people’s part.

The religious and the political are important to guage a person’s ethics and catch wind of their moral compass. Religion, or the lack of it, influences a person’s behaviour in critical ways that would be insane to ignore. As a feminist, it would be difficult to establish a relationship with a man who believes women belong in the kitchen or should be submissive to men. The separate political values will put strain on the relationship. There will be too many conflicts, microaggressions, and resentment over time.

You want your political and religious views to align as much as possible. Overlap should be sought here. You can compromise on many things, but never your values. If you must, then do so consciously, understanding the potential risk such a decision could portend.

The financial values should be interrogated more by people who are seeking romantic relationships. Because money is always a big issue—who spends on dates, what amount to make on a down payment for an apartment; joint account, savings, budgeting. Love is sweet but it, too, has tedious aspects like this. Cash flow is necessary for romance to blossom. In this capitalistic world we live in, love has to use economics to its advantage. The lovers without similar financial values will run bankrupt on both money and love.

Fin

In the end, no one will appreciate you more than someone who gives you enough room for self-disclosure, affirms your interests, no matter how niche, with understanding or curiosity, and shares the same core values which you would defend to the death. It’s easy to navigate the ups and downs of life and relationships when these things are in place. And, of course, it’s not 100% guaranteed—nothing ever is. But if compatibility is a lottery, then the omicron criteria is certainly a way of buying half of all the available tickets.

1. The omicron criteria is a theory that lays down loose rules on how to build long-lasting compatibility based on shared experiences, shared interests, and shared values. It further suggests that for a shared experience to qualify, it must be crucial to the person’s identity and feature self-disclosure; for a shared interest to qualify, it must reach a certain level of überspecificity; and, for shared values to count in the omicron criteria, they must be non-negotiable, identity affirming, and only subject to change after an extensive review or a colossal emotional event on the other person’s part.