The question arrives in message two and my answer is always the same
- Looking for
- somebody who has already solved the room problem, or is honest that they have not
- Experience
- Three years, one dynamic of ten months.
- Around
- the east, Amsterdam
Where would this happen. It arrives in the second or third message every single time, and my answer has been no for four years. I sublet a room from a woman who is in the flat five days a week. The walls are original, which is a polite way of saying there are none. There is no version of this that happens where I live.
The app has a field for my height and my star sign and forty activities I might enjoy, and no field at all for the single practical fact that decides whether two people on this board will ever be in a room together. So the conversation goes well for a fortnight and then dies at exactly the same point, politely, over and over.
Twenty nine, the east, submissive, three years in, and I have watched perhaps a dozen promising conversations die on this single point. I now ask it in my own second message, cheerfully, before either of us is invested. It costs me matches and it has saved me most of a year.
A great deal of what I want does not require a private room at all. Rules, reporting, being held to a standard, being corrected in words. The rest can wait until one of us has an answer.
Not looking for anybody who suggests I simply find another flat, which is advice I have had three times from people who have clearly not looked. Not looking to be a logistics problem somebody solves for me. Not looking for a person who wants the whole thing agreed before we have spoken out loud.