I answer every message once, and here is what happens next
- Looking for
- somebody who can carry the second message as well as the first
- Experience
- Fourteen years, three long dynamics, one of them nine years.
- Around
- Manhattan, New York
Somewhere between forty and sixty messages a week arrive and I answer all of them, once. That is not a boast, it is the setup for the real problem: almost none of those answers turns into a conversation. I reply with a question and about four in five never come back.
I have thought about why, because it looks like rudeness and I do not think it is. I think most people here have learned to open a hundred doors and walk through none, and the message that arrives was never really addressed to me. It was addressed to a queue.
Forty six, Manhattan, dominant, fourteen years in, three long dynamics, one of which ran nine years and ended when she died. I have been unattached for two and I am in no hurry, which is the only reason I can be this patient about the arithmetic.
What I am looking for is an adult with a full life who wants a structured dynamic inside it rather than instead of it. Someone I could describe accurately to a friend after a month. Someone who answers a question with an answer.
I am direct, occasionally to the point of bluntness, and I will tell you when something is not working rather than letting it quietly rot. Not looking for a person in the middle of a crisis who needs someone to take the wheel of their entire life. Not looking to be anybody's first conversation about therapy. And not looking for a correspondence that never becomes a meeting.