I will not go the other way with somebody I met last month
Posted as the_year_rule
- Looking for
- a long friendship first and a switch dynamic much later
- Experience
- Eighteen years, both sides, only ever with people I knew well.
- Around
- the east side, Los Angeles
I have led with people I had known a week. I have never once followed with anybody I had known less than a year, and at this point I have stopped treating that as a quirk and started treating it as a requirement.
Forty, the east side, switch, eighteen years in. The reason is not mysterious. When I lead I control what happens and I can stop it at any moment without a conversation. When I follow I am handing that over, and I need a year of watching somebody be consistent about small unglamorous things before I will. How they talk about the people they used to see. Whether they turn up. What they do when they are told no about something trivial.
So what I am proposing is genuinely long. Months of friendship and possibly a dynamic running in one direction, with the other direction as something that might happen much later and might never happen at all.
That is a strange thing to advertise for and I know it rules out almost everybody. But I have twice been talked out of my own timeline by somebody persuasive, and both times I regretted it, and I would rather post something narrow and true than something broad and false.
If you are reading this and thinking you could probably speed it up, you are precisely the person it was written to exclude.