Describe them before you meet them

If you describe the next person as a feeling, you will recognise anxiety and call it fate. Feelings are fast. Habits take a month to see. Write the habits. They make a plan and keep it. They can be disappointed without punishing you. They ask how you are and wait for the answer. They have a life that does not require you to be the audience. Then write what you will bring. A person who stays needs somewhere to land. If your evenings are a tribunal about someone else, there is no chair free.

Keep the list somewhere you will see it after a dazzling weekend. Dazzle argues. The list does not. There is a proverb about not judging a book by its cover. The cover, in the early weeks, is chemistry. The book is what they do when the chemistry is inconvenient: when you are dull, or late, or honest about a limit. Do not judge a book by its cover was never an instruction to ignore the pages.

Timing is the second question

Ask timing after the habits, not before. When does a meeting like that belong, given the life you actually have? The life includes the city, the hours, and the open threads. If you start with when, you will hunt a date and have no way to recognise the person who arrives on it. De Botton’s point about compatibility being an achievement still needs a floor you can name in advance. Otherwise every intense week will claim to be the achievement.

The chair you are offering

Be as specific about yourself as about them. Evenings free, or not. A willingness to be new, or a heart still in court with the past. A body that needs slowness. A temper you are learning to name before it speaks. The person you describe will have to meet the person you are, not the person the longing invented. This is not pessimism. It is hospitality. You do not invite someone into a house and then pretend the house is empty.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

Read it beside your list, not instead of it. Some differences are the work of love: taste, pace, the way you spend a Sunday. Some are the floor cracking: contempt, disappearance, a refusal to repair. Achievement happens above the floor. It does not replace one.

What belongs on the page

• Four habits you would trust on a boring Thursday.
• Two things you will no longer call love, written where you can see them after a dazzling night.
• One honest line about the life they would be entering.
• The season you are actually free, if you are free.

Order, if you sit with a reader

A session can hold both questions if you keep them in order. First the habits. Then the season. If you reverse them, you will leave with a hunger for a date and the same fog about faces. The list is not a spell. It is a memory aid for the weekend your body tries to forget it.