Julian Publication
Give People Somewhere to Stand
Why I stopped trying to explain myself—and started inviting people into an experience instead.
It started with a dating profile.
Like a lot of people, I wanted my profile to reflect who I was. So I did what seemed natural: I made lists.
The things I enjoyed.
The things I valued.
The kind of person I was looking for.
Everything I wrote was true. Yet somehow, it all felt... flat.
At first, I couldn’t understand why. If the information was accurate, why wasn’t it connecting?
The missing piece
The more I thought about it, the more I realized something.
Those lists made perfect sense to me because I already knew the stories behind them. Every sentence carried years of experiences that never made it onto the page:
A single line about enjoying long conversations reminded me of countless nights talking with friends.
A sentence about curiosity represented years of questions, books, observations, and mistakes.
To me, those words were full of meaning. To someone seeing my profile for the first time, they were just words.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was just assuming they had context they couldn’t possibly have.
A different approach
So I tried something else.
Instead of describing myself, I described experiences.
Instead of listing qualities, I invited people into moments.
I asked questions they could imagine answering.
I wrote prompts they could project themselves into.
Something changed almost immediately. The conversations became easier, and the responses felt more natural.
People weren’t connecting with a description of me. They were connecting with an experience we could briefly share.
It isn’t just dating
I realized this wasn’t really about the dating profile.
This is how stories work. It’s why certain conversations stay with us. It’s why movies can make us cry even though we’ve never lived the lives of the characters on screen.
We’re not connecting to a list of facts. We’re stepping into an experience.
For a few moments, we get to see the world through someone else’s eyes while still bringing our own lives with us. Maybe that’s why stories travel so much farther than explanations.
Somewhere to stand
Looking back, I don’t think the biggest change was learning how to write a better profile.
The biggest change was realizing I needed to stop assuming people already understood me. They didn’t. And they weren’t supposed to.
Understanding isn’t something we can demand from someone who has just met us. It has to be built.
And sometimes, the best way to build it isn’t by explaining ourselves more clearly.
It’s by giving someone somewhere to stand.
A place where they can bring their own experiences, make sense of what they’re seeing, and gradually discover who we are along the way.
Maybe that’s what connection has been all along: not asking someone to see the world exactly as we do, but giving them enough room to find a piece of themselves in what we’re sharing.