We negotiated everything perfectly in writing and it collapsed in a room
- Looking for
- somebody willing to meet early and negotiate afterwards
- Experience
- Nine years, three dynamics, one of them agreed entirely in advance.
- Around
- the west, London
Six weeks of careful discussion. Limits, expectations, how we would handle it if either of us wanted out, all of it worked through properly and all of it agreed. Then we were in a room together for an hour and it was obvious to both of us within ten minutes that none of it was going to happen, for no reason either of us could name. Two adults, entirely compatible on paper, with absolutely nothing between them.
Forty, the west, switch, nine years in, three arrangements and one that existed only as a document.
I do not think the negotiating was wasted, exactly. I think we had built a thing that could only exist in text and had confused it with a thing that could exist between two people. This app makes that particular mistake extremely easy, because the writing is where everything happens until suddenly it is not.
So I meet early now, briefly, in daylight, before the detailed conversation rather than after it. Everything else can be worked out once we know there is anything to work out.
What I want is either direction, ongoing, structured. Not looking for a long correspondence. Not looking to agree the whole shape of something with a stranger. And not looking for anybody who finds an early meeting a lot to ask.