You can filter for height and not for whether somebody turns up
- Looking for
- somebody reliable, which is apparently an exotic requirement
- Experience
- Eleven years, three dynamics, two of them long.
- Around
- the west, Sydney
The filters on this app will let me narrow by height, by whether somebody smokes, by distance, by age, and by about forty activities. There is no filter for the only quality that has ever decided whether one of these arrangements worked, which is whether a person does what they said they would do on a day when they do not feel like it.
I have been stood up eleven times in three years. Not by bad people. By perfectly pleasant ones who agreed to something in a warm moment on a phone and then discovered on the day that they did not want to drive across a city in the dark in July.
Forty six, out west, dominant, eleven years in. Three dynamics, two of them long, one of which taught me most of what I know by ending badly.
So my process is dull on purpose. A short call, then a public meeting inside a fortnight, then a small commitment that costs almost nothing and has to be honoured before anything larger is discussed. People who are going to be unreliable are unreliable at the small scale first, and that is a kindness to both of us.
What I want is an ongoing dynamic with somebody who has room in their life for it. Not looking for a person in a crisis. Not looking to be anybody's escape hatch. And not looking for enthusiasm, because I have had a great deal of enthusiasm and almost none of it survived a rainy Wednesday.