Willingness to travel is the only test I have that works
- Looking for
- somebody whose interest survives contact with a map
- Experience
- Nine years, two arrangements, both of them still on good terms.
- Around
- downtown, Los Angeles
Everything else people say on here is free. Anybody can write a paragraph about wanting structure, anybody can agree with your limits, anybody can be delightful for a fortnight at no cost whatsoever. The first thing that costs something is an hour of a Saturday spent on a road, and that is the point at which I learn who I have actually been talking to. It is not a devotion test and I am not making anybody prove anything. It is simply the first real information in the conversation.
Forty two, downtown, dominant, nine years in, two arrangements and both people still friends of mine.
I do exactly the same amount of travelling, and after the first meeting I usually do more of it, because I am the one with the flexible week. The asymmetry is only at the start and it is only because I have driven a long way to sit opposite somebody who was never going to do this and knew it.
What I want is an ongoing structured dynamic with somebody who wants the same for a long time: expectations agreed properly, a weekly evening, tasks in between, and a plain conversation when it stops working.
Not looking for anyone who needs an enormous amount of encouragement to leave the house. Not looking for a correspondence with somebody in another county. And not looking for the person who is very interested until a date is proposed and then extremely busy.