There is a short list of people I will never swipe on, and it keeps growing
- Looking for
- somebody genuinely new to me, which is getting harder every year
- Experience
- Sixteen years, three dynamics, two of them very long.
- Around
- Salford, Manchester
I keep a list. Not written down anywhere, but a real one: people I will not match with under any circumstances. A friend's former partner. Two people who work where my sister works. Somebody who once told me a great deal about a mutual acquaintance and has therefore told that acquaintance a great deal about me. It is about eleven names and it grows by one or two a year.
That is what sixteen years in one city does. The app presents everybody as a fresh possibility and about a third of my queue is not, and there is no way to encode that in a filter.
Fifty three, Salford, dominant, sixteen years in.
I mention it because it explains something people find odd about me, which is that I am slow and I ask a lot of questions before I say anything about myself. It is not gatekeeping. It is that I am working out whether we are already connected, and I would rather find that out in week one than in month four.
What I run is steady rather than intense. Written expectations, a fixed evening, reporting between, and an arrangement I intend to still be running in two years.
Not looking for anybody who wants a title in week one. Not looking to be somebody's first conversation about any of this.