Four video calls before a drink, and we know how that sounds

Four video calls. Both of us on every one. That is what we ask for before anybody agrees to be in the same room, and roughly half the men we speak to stop replying somewhere around the second.

We did it the fast way once. Five years ago we met somebody inside a week, liked him enormously, and spent the following four months slowly discovering that almost nothing he had told us was true, including which city he lived in. Nobody was hurt in a way that shows. It still took a year before either of us wanted to try again.

Forty five and forty seven, on the Westchester side, an hour in if the timing is kind. What the calls are for is not interrogation. It is watching how a person behaves when a conversation goes somewhere unplanned, whether he asks anything, whether he speaks to both of us or drifts toward her, and whether the third call sounds like the first.

We know this reads as cold. Two men have said so, one at length. We would rather lose them than repeat that year. What we want is something long. One person, seen regularly, for as long as it suits all three of us. We are not collecting experiences and we are past the age where somebody new every month sounds like anything but work.

Not looking for anyone who treats the process as a test to be passed and then dropped. Not looking for anyone who cannot say what he is doing with other people. Not looking to begin anything before the autumn.