I have written this eleven times and this is the least bad version
Looking for a couple with some tolerance for a man who is visibly nervous in writing
There are eleven drafts of this in my notes and the earlier ones are considerably worse. Two were jokes the whole way through. One was four hundred words about my job, which I do not believe anybody has ever wanted. One opened with a question that I now realise reads as an interrogation. This is the least bad, a standard I have made peace with.
Twenty seven, the inner city, eighteen months in. One arrangement of roughly three months, ended amicably when they decided to take a break from everything for a while. She told me afterwards that my first message had been odd but that she had answered it anyway, because it was obviously written to the two of them rather than to anybody in general.
In person I am fine. Genuinely. Something about writing to strangers on this specific subject turns me into a man composing a formal complaint about a delayed parcel. My friends would find this entire post baffling.
What I want is to be around one couple for a long time rather than to be an event in somebody's year. Free most evenings, I barely drink, and I am reliable in a way that is dull and useful. I cannot host: I share with two other people and one of them works from home permanently.
If you write back and my reply takes two days, it is not a tactic. It is me writing eleven versions again.
Before the first drink Replying goes through the connected platform, so nothing about you is shared until you decide to share it. Take contact slowly and keep identifying details back until trust is earned. Meet somewhere public the first time, with your own way home from it, and if you are a couple then go together. Tell someone outside it where you are going. Never send money to someone you have not met. And if a post or a reply reads wrong, flag it rather than talking yourself out of the feeling.
Before you answer a post like this
Answering as a couple means screening him together rather than one of you doing it privately. Start here.
- Screening a third as a couple, not alone
- The six things to agree before you answer anyone
- Rules that survive contact with a real evening