It takes time to know a person

It takes time to know a person.

It takes time to know a person.

Tell me, how many times do we have to say it before it enters the skull?

In the world of first meetings, known by the code name dating, there is a positively epidemic flowering of idiotic tips and signs supposed to help you determine the seriousness, the fitness, the personality and the general worth of a potential candidate within the five minutes between the first drink and the second.

Talking to somebody for an entire evening does not give you knowledge. It gives you the illusion of knowledge.

If that injures your ego or interferes with your continued pride in your ability to read people, too bad. Your excessive certainty does not so much as tickle human complexity.

Even if you ended the evening between the sheets, you still do not know them. It is still an illusion of knowledge rather than real knowledge. There are layers in a person so deep and so slow that they have nothing whatever to do with the first night.

So take a breath and try to get acquainted.

Clarity, yes. Arrogance, absolutely not.

And here is why this matters practically rather than as an admonition. The illusion of knowledge is not neutral — it actively stops you gathering the real thing. Once you have concluded who somebody is, you spend the following months confirming it rather than discovering them, and every piece of contradicting evidence gets filed as an exception.

Which is how people end up, two years in, saying they had no idea. They had a great deal of idea. It was formed on a Tuesday, over one drink, and then defended.