The whole board defaults to English and I have stopped going along with it
- Looking for
- somebody I can be precise with, in whichever language we both actually think in
- Experience
- Eighteen years, three dynamics, two of them very long.
- Around
- out by the ring, Amsterdam
Almost every profile here is in English, including, for years, mine. It is a sensible default in a city where half the population arrived recently. It is also the reason I spent a decade running dynamics in my second language and never quite saying what I meant.
Precision is most of this. A rule that is nearly right is worse than no rule. A limit described approximately gets crossed by accident by somebody acting in good faith. I can be warm in English and I can be clear in English, but I cannot be exact in it, and exactness is the part that keeps people safe.
Fifty three, out by the ring, dominant, eighteen years in.
So my profile is now in Dutch, my matches have dropped by more than half, and the conversations that remain are better than anything I had before. I am not making a point about anybody. If your Dutch is workable and you are willing to be corrected, write in it. If English is genuinely the language you think in, write in that and I will meet you there, and we will both accept that I am less precise than I would like to be.
What I want is a long arrangement with written terms and a weekly rhythm. Not looking for an evening. Not looking to be anybody's practice.