The community board · United States
Everything in Los Angeles is decided by the drive. A first meeting costs somebody two hours in the car before anyone has said hello, so couples here screen hard on video before they will agree to one, and posts that do not say which side of the county the writer is on get skipped. The upside is that people live in actual houses with actual doors, so hosting at home is more realistic here than in most cities on this board. The counterweight is a lot of people whose work depends on not being recognised, and they say so in the first paragraph rather than the fifth.
Posts come from the Valley, the Westside, the South Bay, the east side and the Orange County side. People say which side they are on early, because it decides who can realistically meet.
How the board is run A post lands on a city board because the person who wrote it said they were somewhere near Los Angeles, and that is the whole of what the city tells you. It is a reading board rather than a list of people nearby. Everything on it is anonymous: no names, email addresses, phone numbers, messaging handles, external profiles or photographs are published here, and none are asked for. Nothing is for hire, so anything with a price on it comes off, as does anything describing somebody who did not write it. Posts run for six weeks and then retire, and each carries a flag. Posting and replying for real both happen through the connected platform, where you decide what you share and when.
A couple looking for a third, together and on the same page.
We packed the car one October, sat in traffic with the dog and two boxes of paperwork, and spent three nights somewhere else not knowing whether the house would be there. It was. Almost everything about our life carried on exactly as before, except that we stopped putting things off.
Looking for somebody who also stopped waiting for the right moment
Read the full post →Two video calls before anybody gets in a car. Both of us on both calls. We are strict about it and the reason is entirely practical rather than moral: in this city a wasted first meeting costs four hours of somebody's life, and we have twice sat in a bar realising within ten minutes that the person opposite us was not who had been writing.
Looking for a man who understands why the calls come first here
Read the full post →He wants the whole story afterwards. Not a summary, not the headlines. What was said, what was funny, what she thought at the time, in the kind of detail that takes two hours and a pot of tea. That has been the arrangement for four years and it is the part he values most.
Looking for somebody who is comfortable being talked about kindly
Read the full post →Everything we do happens in the middle of the afternoon, and the reason is not mysterious. Driving anywhere in this county between four and seven is an hour of somebody's life spent being furious, and nobody arrives from that in a good mood.
Looking for somebody whose day has an afternoon in it
Read the full post →We have a house with a gate, a garage you can park inside, no shared walls and an extremely unhelpful dog. In five years of doing this, that combination has mattered more than anything either of us has ever written in a post.
Looking for somebody who wants an ordinary evening rather than an occasion
Read the full post →A woman searching with her partner’s knowledge and agreement.
We have exactly one rule and it is about time. I am home by eleven. Not most nights, not usually, always, and it has held for seven years across two arrangements and about two hundred evenings.
Looking for somebody who can live inside a very specific window
Read the full post →I am not going to be your first. I have done it twice, both times with men who were lovely and completely unprepared, and both times I ended up managing the entire emotional weather of the evening while pretending to have a nice time.
Looking for somebody who has done this before and knows the shape of it
Read the full post →I have cancelled on people more times than I am comfortable admitting, and almost every time it has been because a forty minute drive turned into an hour and fifty and I was already tired before I started. It is never about the person and it always looks like it is.
Looking for somebody who will not read a cancelled Tuesday as a verdict
Read the full post →The search in Los Angeles runs on the same four rules it runs on everywhere, and they are mostly about the part before anybody is in a room together.
For a post at full length, the hand-written ones on the main board run longer than a board entry ever does: a couple asking for one careful conversation, a single man in no hurry at all, and a hotwife searching with her husband beside her.
The board runs in 21 cities, and each one reads its own way.
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