Twenty years in, and I have never once started fast
Posted as slow_build_r
- Looking for
- one person over years rather than several over months
- Experience
- Twenty one years. Three long dynamics, the last of them eleven.
- Around
- Manhattan, New York
Three dynamics in twenty one years. The last ran eleven years and ended when she moved back to her family in another state, and we still speak most weeks. That ratio is the most useful thing I can tell you about myself. I do not collect people and I am not looking for variety.
Forty five, Manhattan, dominant. I am unhurried to a degree that frustrates people who arrive here wanting something to happen soon. My first meetings are a conversation in a public place and nothing else. My second meetings are usually the same. By the third I generally know, and so do they.
What I am building toward is a dynamic that runs alongside two ordinary lives for a long time. Standing rules, a real structure, and enough room inside it that neither of us has to choose between this and the rest of what we do. Eleven years works because it stops being an event you schedule and becomes the ordinary shape of a Wednesday, and nothing gets to that stage in a hurry.
I am most useful to someone who knows themselves reasonably well and wants a frame rather than an identity. I am the wrong person for someone in the middle of a crisis, and I have learned to recognise that early and step back, which occasionally reads as cold.
If you want something to happen this month, I am not it. If you want something that will still be running in five years, write and tell me what you would like a Tuesday to look like.