I have never done this with somebody I was not already friends with
Posted as only_ever_with_friends
- Looking for
- a friendship first, with everything else a long way behind it
- Experience
- Eight years, three dynamics, all with people I already knew well.
- Around
- Moseley, Birmingham
All three of the arrangements I have had grew out of friendships that were a year or two old before anything else happened. That was never a rule I set. It is simply the only way it has ever worked for me, and I have finally noticed the pattern and stopped arguing with it.
Thirty three, Moseley, eight years in, switch in the plain sense that both directions are real and neither is a favour.
The difficulty is that a board like this one is built the other way round. You meet as strangers with the subject already on the table, and everything after that is a negotiation between two people who do not know each other. I have tried it four times and each one felt like an interview for a job I was not sure I wanted.
So the ask is oddly modest. Somebody to get to know slowly, with no assumption that it turns into anything. If in a year we are friends and nothing else has happened, I will count that as a good outcome rather than a failure, and I mean that literally rather than as a polite hedge.
I should say I am not offering friendship as a graceful way of saying no in advance. I do want the other thing, quite a lot. I just cannot get to it from a standing start. Not looking for anybody working to a timescale. Not looking for someone who will find this frustrating by August, which is fair enough and better discovered now.