I do not start anything with people who have been here under a year
- Looking for
- someone who has already survived a summer here
- Experience
- Fifteen years in this, most of it in one long arrangement.
- Around
- Coral Gables, Miami
It is a blunt rule and I have been asked to justify it often enough that I now put it in writing. If you have been in this city less than a year I will wish you well and move on. Not because new arrivals are less interesting, but because I have twice built something careful with somebody who then discovered, around month eight, that they did not want to live here after all. Both of them were honest. Both of them left.
Fifty eight, dominant, I teach adults, Coral Gables, fifteen years in with one arrangement that ran nine of them and ended when she died. I am not carrying that around as a tragedy, it is simply the shape of my experience.
What I run is slow and quite formal. Expectations in writing, a regular evening, tasks between times, and a long conversation before any of it starts. I am not interested in anything that has to be intense to feel real.
The person I am hoping reads this has been here for years, has a job that keeps them here, and has been on this app long enough to be tired of it. I would rather have one careful conversation with somebody like that than forty openings. And if you are three months off a plane and reading this with irritation, I understand completely, and check back next summer.