Everybody answers. Almost nobody asks anything back
- Looking for
- one person who is curious about somebody other than themselves
- Experience
- Nine years, three dynamics, the longest of them four years.
- Around
- the Westside, Los Angeles
I started keeping a tally in January, which I accept is a strange thing to do. Of thirty one conversations that got past the opening, twenty six consisted entirely of me asking things and being answered. Not rudely. Everybody was perfectly pleasant, everybody wrote at length about themselves, and not one of them ever turned it round and asked me something they had not been prompted to ask.
Forty two, the Westside, switch, nine years in, three arrangements with the longest running four years.
I do not think this is a moral failing of the people involved. I think the app trains it: you are talking to eleven people at once, so you answer what is in front of you and you never build up enough interest in any one of them to be genuinely curious. It is a volume problem wearing the costume of a personality problem.
So what I am looking for is embarrassingly simple. One person who asks me something. After that, an arrangement with real structure, in either direction, though these days I lead more often than not.
Not looking for a pen pal and not looking for someone who is running a shortlist. Not looking to be interviewed either, before anybody swings the other way. And if my first message asks you two questions, that is not a technique, it is just how I talk.