I removed every filter for a month, and it was the best month
- Looking for
- somebody I would have filtered out without ever knowing
- Experience
- Six years, two dynamics, one of them entirely outside my usual type.
- Around
- north of the river, London
Age off, distance wide open, everything else cleared. I did it in January out of frustration and I kept it that way for a month, and what came back was a queue full of people I had been quietly excluding for years without ever consciously deciding to. Two of them became conversations that mattered. One became an arrangement that ran five months and ended for reasons that had nothing to do with any of the boxes I had been ticking.
Thirty two, north of the river, switch, six years in.
The uncomfortable part is what it revealed about the filters themselves. Every one of them had been set at some point for a reason that made sense at the time, and none of them had ever been reviewed, and together they had reduced an enormous city to a very narrow strip of people who looked like the last person I liked.
What I want now is an arrangement with real structure, either direction, ongoing. I lead slightly more than I do not.
Not looking for anybody who has a precise specification. Not looking to be somebody's exception. And if you have been on here a long time, I would genuinely suggest turning them all off for a fortnight, because I cannot think of anything else that changed my experience of this place so much.