I had to tell somebody that a limit had moved, and it was awful
- Looking for
- somebody who expects terms to be revised rather than fixed
- Experience
- Ten years, two dynamics, one of them renegotiated painfully.
- Around
- the west of the city, Berlin
Two years into something good, I realised that one of the things I had agreed to at the start had stopped being all right, and that I had been quietly managing it for months. Telling him took me three weeks to work up to and about ninety seconds to do, and he was completely reasonable about it, and I still felt as though I had broken a contract.
Forty, the west of the city, switch, ten years in.
What I took from it is that the way this app trains people to negotiate, everything settled at the start, in writing, thoroughly, is only half of the job. The other half is a standing expectation that terms will change, said out loud at the beginning so that revising them later is a normal event rather than a confession.
So that is in my terms now, on both sides, and I would like it in yours.
What I want is one arrangement, either direction, with real structure, a weekly evening and obligations in between, and a scheduled conversation every few months where either of us can move something without it being a crisis.
Not looking for anybody who treats an agreement as permanent. Not looking for somebody who will take a change personally. And not looking to manage anything quietly again.