three times this spring i have had the same experience and i want to know whether it is a known thing.
person’s profile has a clear list. specific interests, stated preferences, the whole thing laid out. i read it, i think, right, that lines up with what i want, and i write.
then two weeks into talking it becomes clear that the list is not describing what they actually want. in one case the list was quite intense and what she wanted was mostly company and structure and somebody to have dinner with on a wednesday. in another it was the opposite direction entirely. in the third the list turned out to be things he had read about and found interesting rather than things he wanted.
none of these people were lying. that is what interests me. each of them would have described the list as accurate, and in a sense it was, it just was not describing the same thing i thought i was reading.
so what are the lists actually for? and is there a way of reading one that gets closer to the truth, or is the whole format doing something other than what everybody assumes.
