I swapped the word on my profile every month for half a year
- Looking for
- somebody who wants both directions rather than tolerating one of them
- Experience
- Seven years, two dynamics, one of them properly reciprocal.
- Around
- the inner west, Sydney
For six months I ran an experiment. Same photographs, same paragraph, same everything, and I changed the single word above it every four weeks. What arrived was not a slightly different queue. It was a completely different population, with a different tone, different opening messages, and different assumptions about who I was allowed to be.
The month I was labelled one way, people wrote to me as though I had a job to do. The month I was labelled the other way, people wrote to me as though I needed guiding. Nobody, in either month, wrote as though the word might be incomplete. That is the actual finding and it is why I am on a board instead of in a stack.
Thirty six, the inner west, switch, seven years in. Two real dynamics. Only one of them was genuinely reciprocal and it was easily the best thing I have been part of. The other ran fourteen months and I spent about eleven of those quietly waiting for a turn that was always going to be next month.
What I want is somebody who can actually go both ways rather than politely enduring the other direction once a quarter. That is the whole ask and it is rarer than the word suggests. I am also specific about how the change happens. Not mid evening, not as a surprise, and not because one of us is in a mood. Agreed in advance, with a clear start and a clear end.
Not looking for somebody who wants to try it once for my sake. Not looking to explain the concept again. And not looking for a person who will use the flexibility to avoid ever committing to anything.