The meeting tells me nothing. The seven days afterwards tell me everything

Anybody can manage an hour. I have sat across from men who were charming, attentive and exactly right for sixty minutes, and by the following Friday I had learned everything I actually needed to know, none of which was visible in the coffee shop.

So here is what I watch in the week after, since nobody says it out loud. Whether there is a message that evening, which there should not be. Whether the second message arrives before I have written, and how it reads if it does. Whether a small thing I mentioned in passing turns up later, unremarked. Whether the third day of silence produces anxiety. Whether an ordinary request, made without explanation, is simply done.

None of that is a trick and none of it is unfair. It is a week of normal life, which is the material the whole arrangement is going to be made of.

Fifty, Manhattan, twenty two years leading, three arrangements, the longest thirteen years. What I want is a long one. Duties, standing rules, a household that runs better because somebody else is in it. Nothing occasional and nothing arranged in advance as an event.

The single most common way men fail the week is by trying to sustain the intensity of the meeting. Do not. The whole point is to find out whether we can be dull at each other for a very long time.