If you’d like to know my number one desire with regard to any potential suitor, it is the man who is both brave and curious enough to say, I’d like to get to know you well. Not let’s hang out sometime. Not even you’re so hot. But an honest request for actual, personal conversation — ideally over the first of many excursions together. I can’t tell you the number of people who feel confident enough to express a strong sexual interest in me without even bothering to consider who I am, as a person. Others tell me that this is normal, because men are so strongly motivated by the visual, and by the sexual. But show me a man who leads with his fantasies about me, and I will show you a relationship that is doomed before it even begins. Attraction, of course, is necessary to get any sort of relationship started, at all. But a flower cannot bloom unless someone has taken the time to plant it deep in the ground, to water it, and to make sure it has access to the right amount of sunlight and nutrients, so it can grow strong roots. And that’s the kind of relationship I want: where the other person and I are attentive to the kind of plant (er, person) each one of us, so we can take care of the relationship to help it grow. I would also hope that getting to know each other wouldn’t be a burden, but instead, a process that is so enjoyable that we keep wanting to do it as time goes on, so we get to know each other better and better. Can we give each other what we both need and want? Do we have enough in common to make communication not a burden, but a pleasure? Is there enough mutual admiration and respect to help sustain the attraction beyond the first few encounters? None of this is ever a guarantee, of course. But gulping down the dessert course, first, will only make me feel sick and unfulfilled. Actually, I’d rather be left alone entirely, at this point, than be with the kind of person who doesn’t care about getting to know me well at all. ❤️‍🔥—Y.B.D.