A first meeting done properly, described in full, since nobody explains it

Nobody writes down what a good first meeting looks like, so men either arrive as though for an interview or arrive as though something is going to happen, and both are wrong. Here is the whole of it, as plainly as I can put it.

You arrive early enough that you are already sitting when I get there, and you are not on your phone. You stand when I arrive. You have eaten. You are dressed as you would be for lunch with somebody's mother, which is to say clean, ironed and unremarkable. You have brought nothing, because nothing is the correct thing to bring and a gift at a first meeting is a small piece of pressure.

You talk about your life and you ask about mine, and you do not raise any of this until I do. If I do not raise it, that is information rather than a failure. It lasts an hour. You do not suggest extending it. When it ends you say you would like to meet again and then you leave, and you do not send a message that evening asking how it went.

Fifty, the east, twenty four years leading, and I have done that first hour something like sixty times.

What it is not: an audition, a negotiation, or an occasion for a written list of your interests. It is an hour in daylight with a stranger. Almost everything that has ever gone well for me started exactly that dully.