Switch, west, I will want to write it all down first
Posted as tape_measure
- Looking for
- someone who finds negotiating enjoyable rather than a chore
- Experience
- Nine years, four arrangements, all of them documented.
- Around
- west, London
The negotiation is my favourite part and I have stopped apologising for that. Two hours with a notebook, going through everything properly, is genuinely one of the better evenings available.
Thirty six, west London, nine years in, four arrangements, all of which had something written down. My checklists are long. My questions are specific. I want to know not just what you will not do but what you would resent, which is a different question and the one nobody asks. Switch, and I usually work out which way round after the negotiation rather than before, because the shape of what somebody wants tells you more than the label they arrived with.
I know how this reads. Clinical, unromantic, too much like work. In practice the opposite happens: once everything is settled I stop thinking about it entirely and I am much less careful in a good way, because there is nothing left to be careful about. What I will not do is agree to work it out as we go. That is not caution, it is that I have done it twice and both times somebody quietly had a bad evening and told me weeks later.
For clarity, since it has come up: none of this involves anything being bought or sold, and the notebook is not a contract in any legal sense. It is two people writing down what they said, so that in six weeks nobody has to rely on their memory of a conversation. Also worth saying: I will want to revisit it. Not constantly, but at three months, because what people can say at the start and what they can say once they trust you are different lists.