I read boards rather than profiles, and this is what I look for
- Looking for
- somebody who has written a paragraph about their actual week
- Experience
- Ten years, two dynamics, both of them started from something written.
- Around
- the east, London
A profile is a shop window and everybody knows it, so everybody writes accordingly. A post like this one is longer, harder to fake and enormously more informative, and the two arrangements I have had in the last decade both started with something somebody had written at length rather than with a photograph I liked. So I read, and I write to perhaps one person a fortnight.
Forty, the east, dominant, ten years in, two arrangements with the longer at four years.
What I am looking for when I read is not eloquence. It is specifics: an actual week, an actual constraint, something that could only be true of one person. The posts I skip are the ones that could have been written by anybody, and I skip them regardless of how well phrased they are.
What I run is an ongoing structured arrangement. Expectations agreed properly, a fixed weekly evening, contact and small obligations in between, and a review when something stops fitting.
Not looking for a person whose entire self description is a list of things they enjoy. Not looking for somebody who wants to be pursued at volume. And if I write to you, expect me to have read all of it and to ask about the boring part rather than the interesting one, because the boring part is where people accidentally tell the truth.