I write down what people say they want, and I read it back
- Looking for
- somebody whose answers in month three resemble their answers in week one
- Experience
- Fourteen years, three dynamics, the longest of them eight years.
- Around
- the south east, London
Early on I ask three or four plain questions about what somebody wants and what they will not do, and I write the answers down. Not as a test and not to catch anybody out. I do it because people revise themselves without noticing, particularly when they are keen, and by month three a limit that was firm in week one has quietly become negotiable. Reading it back is usually the most useful conversation we have.
Fifty, the south east, dominant, fourteen years in, three arrangements with the longest running eight years.
Almost always the drift goes one way: towards agreeing to more in order to keep somebody interested. I would rather notice that in month three than in year two, and I have been on the wrong end of it myself.
What I run is slow, written down and quite formal. A standing evening. Expectations that get revisited on purpose. Tasks that continue between times, because that is where a dynamic actually lives.
Not looking for anybody in a hurry to hand everything over. Not looking for somebody who says yes to things to be agreeable, which I will spot and which will slow us both down. And not looking to be told that writing things down takes the mystery out of it, because I have heard that from two people and neither of them lasted the winter.