The last three people I built something with left the country
- Looking for
- somebody whose life is actually rooted here
- Experience
- Fourteen years, four dynamics, three of them ended by emigration.
- Around
- Friedrichshain, Berlin
Two years, three years, eighteen months. All three ended at the same point, which is when a job somewhere else became available and the answer was obviously yes. I do not resent any of them for going and I would have gone too. But I have built the same structure from nothing four times now and I am not doing it a fifth time for somebody who has a return ticket in a drawer.
Forty five, Friedrichshain, dominant, fourteen years in this.
So the question comes early and it is not romantic: where do you expect to be living in three years, and what would have to happen for that to change. I listen to how specific the answer is rather than to how confident it sounds.
What I run is long and slow. Terms agreed properly at the start, a weekly evening, obligations through the week, a review every few months.
Not looking for anybody here on a fixed term. Not looking for somebody who will tell me they love this city, which everybody says in their first two years. And not looking to be the reason anybody stays, which was offered once and was the worst possible answer.