A fortnight from first message to a coffee, or I close it
- Looking for
- somebody who can find one hour in fourteen days
- Experience
- Eight years, three arrangements, all begun quickly.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
Two weeks. That is the rule, and I say it in the second message so nobody is surprised. If we have not sat down somewhere public within a fortnight of starting to talk, I stop, politely, and I do not carry it on in the background.
The rule exists because I once spent five months writing to somebody wonderful who was never going to meet me. Not out of malice. She simply liked the writing, and I liked it too, and neither of us noticed that we had built a whole thing out of nothing that could ever leave a phone. In a city where everybody is twenty minutes apart, five months is a decision, not an accident.
Thirty seven, the west, switch, eight years in, three arrangements and every single one began with a meeting inside two weeks.
I am not saying urgency is romantic. I am saying a person in a room is a different quantity of information than a person in a chat window, and no amount of typing converts one into the other. What I want afterwards is a proper ongoing arrangement, both directions in time, planned rather than improvised.
Not looking for a pen pal. Not looking for anybody whose diary is genuinely full for a month, since that is a fine reason and simply not compatible with me.