Our vetting has four stages and most people leave at the second
Looking for one man who finds a long process reassuring rather than insulting
Stage one is writing, and most of what arrives dies there because it was clearly written to nobody in particular. Stage two is a long phone call, and this is where the majority go, usually because a voice gives away in ten minutes what a paragraph can hide for a fortnight. Stage three is meeting in daylight with a hard stop on it. Stage four is meeting again. Nothing happens at any of the four.
We set it out here because people have been discovering it one stage at a time and concluding we are messing them about.
Forty one and forty four, the north shore, seven years of this. Out of something like forty conversations we have had three arrangements. The longest ran two years and ended when he took a job in another state, and we still hear from him at odd intervals.
The reason for all of it is not that we think men are dangerous. It is that this city is small in exactly the way that matters. Two of those forty turned out to be one step away from somebody we work with, and we found that out at stage two both times, which is precisely what stage two is for.
If a process like that reads as suspicion, we understand, and there are couples on this board who move faster and are not wrong to. We are asking for the man who hears four stages and thinks it sounds sensible rather than exhausting.
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
Two people wrote this together, and both of them have to say yes to you. These are the three written for the man on the other end of it.
- What makes a single man read as safe
- Vetting a couple: the screening men skip
- The first meeting: a drink, all three of you