Rope bottoms · Brooklyn, New York
I asked around about a man and got three blank looks
Pinned as nobody_knows_him
- Wants
- a partner I can judge by how he behaves over months rather than by rumour
- Rope so far
- Six years, three partnerships, all of them found the hard way.
- Around
- Brooklyn, New York
Last winter I met someone I liked and did the sensible thing, which was ask four people who have been doing this a long time whether they knew him. Three of them had never heard the name. The fourth had met him once, at something, and could not remember which year. That is the honest state of information in this city and it took me a while to stop treating it as a failure on my part.
Thirty five, Brooklyn, six years in. What I have had to build instead is my own method, and it is unglamorous. I talk to somebody for a long time before anything happens. I notice how they are with people who cannot do anything for them. I pay attention to whether a small stated boundary of mine gets remembered two weeks later, because that one has never yet been wrong.
So what I am after is somebody who is comfortable being observed for a while and does not read patience as suspicion. I am not going to ask you for references, because there are none to give in a city this size and I know it.
What I want at the end of that is a long partnership. One person, a standing evening, and enough time together that we stop being strangers who are careful with each other and become two people who know how the other one is doing from across a room.
Not looking for anything quick. Not looking for a man who wants to establish his credentials in the first message. And not looking to be somebody's spare evening.