quote:

ORIGINAL: cravinspankin

Doms and Masters,
I wonder if you feel uncomfortable, or that it's inappropriate, when a sub or slave you're chatting with via E-mail asks you questions about yourself and your interests?
Do you feel that if it's important you'll tell her and she doesn't need to ask?
Or do you answer her questions, believing it's an important part of the getting-to-know-each other stage of finding a compatible sub or slave?

quote:

ORIGINAL: cravinspankin

Doms and Masters,
I wonder if you feel uncomfortable, or that it's inappropriate, when a sub or slave you're chatting with via E-mail asks you questions about yourself and your interests?
Do you feel that if it's important you'll tell her and she doesn't need to ask?

cravin

quote:

When I tried to take an area suggested by one of the questions and start some real dialog, do some exploring, try to share some context from my end and see not just what the other person thought but how she thought,

quote:

ORIGINAL: Noah

quote:

ORIGINAL: cravinspankin

Doms and Masters,
I wonder if you feel uncomfortable, or that it's inappropriate, when a sub or slave you're chatting with via E-mail asks you questions about yourself and your interests?
Do you feel that if it's important you'll tell her and she doesn't need to ask?

cravin

There is another dimension to this issue, for me at least.

If I have a little interest in someone, whether as some level of potential kink partner or in some other way, I'm pleased for the chance to get acquainted. Facts and opinions are shared and trust hopefully grows. If trust does grow then sharing deepens. It is the model of "interviewing" that turns me off.

I guess some people see it as efficient, or something: here are the ten/twenty/two hundred questions I like to get answered right at the start because if any of the answers are wrong, I'm not gonna waste my time.

Well if that is your approach then someone else is going to be more interested in you than I am. You are wasting your time so I'm happy to usher you along with that bit of clarity. No hard feelings.

Or maybe your list of questions isn't a checklist, as such. Maybe you just want to go through a bunch of questions, pre-written or spontaneously generated, and try to get a feel for someone that way. Again, if this is your communication style then fine. Someone with a compatible style may respond very well. I probably wouldn't.

I want conversation to happen, not an interview. I recently had a chat wherein I had the unsettling sense of being accosted on a street corner with a microphone stuck in my face while a barrage of very small and factual questions erupted continuously. When I tried to take an area suggested by one of the questions and start some real dialog, do some exploring, try to share some context from my end and see not just what the other person thought but how she thought, I was met with a another burst of "short answer" questions before I could even finish typing my response to the previous one.

I shared my sense of how the chat was going. She was nervous, she said. Something about trying to convince herself that I wasn't a mass murderer (must have read my journal.) There are lots of ways that a person might act when nervous. That is perfectly fine with me but "local news investigative reporter" mode doesn't happen to be one that I find attractive. She and I each stayed within our boundaries and parted amicably and pretty immediately.

So what I'm suggesting is that you separate a person's willingness to submit to a barrage of questions, on the one hand, from his or her willingness to reveal themselves and get acquainted.

I want to experience getting to know someone in chat or e-mail as something like the way I get to know someone on the dance floor. Do you have any moves? I'm not gonna ask you to list them; I'm gonna take you by the hand and give you the chance to show me. Do you have enough sense of yourself to display them?

That is, can you trust a little teeny bit, and realistically and with discernment see where that goes, and then extend yourself just a little more if it feels right?

Can you be expressive even while being lead? It isn't cleverness I'm looking for--though a little of that can be fun. It has more to do with the ability to be in the moment, feel whatever natural rhythm might exist between us and go with it. The factual stuff needs to come out, of course, but it usually does come out very naturally and at a pace that I like in the course of lively conversation. I could make a list of questions inwhich number six was: "Can you be in the moment with me," but I can hardly imagine anything stupider.

And really, if someone is capable of being in the moment with me, well then their views on cats vs. dogs or dietary preferences aren't likely to be problematic one way or the other.

Do you like ______?
What is your favorite _______?
What do you ______?
When do you ______?
If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
How many this and what kind of that and on and on ...

Maybe this kind of exchange has a whole different feel for some people and within this kind of exchange they feel that they can really get acquainted and express themselves. That's cool.

Please consider that there are other ways to get to know a person than to interview them. For me it hasn't to do, for instance, with feeling theatened by long lists of questions; it has to do with personally finding that mode of interaction tiresome. For my part I find some of the other options both more rewarding and more fun.