Last week on this site, Maria Linforth-Hall asked a question that has stayed with me: what are the Liberal Democrats for? One line in particular. “Having individual policies is not necessarily the same as communicating a coherent political vision.” She then asked whether ordinary people can recognise liberal values in the practical answers the party offers to their everyday problems.

I should say where I’m writing from. I’m not a party member. I write for LibDem Dating, an independent dating site for liberal-minded singles in the UK, which has no connection to the party and no endorsement from it. So I’m looking in from outside. But I spend a lot of my working life thinking about how people decide whom to trust, and Maria’s question sounds very familiar from where I sit.

You might expect a dating site for liberals to be full of people listing their positions. Proportional representation, rejoining the EU, scrapping the two-child limit. Some profiles do read like that, and in my experience they’re rarely the ones that get a reply. Nobody falls in love with a manifesto. What draws people in is harder to put in a bullet point: a sense of how the other person treats people.

The profiles I find most persuasive barely mention politics at all. They talk about fairness, about curiosity, about being willing to change their mind. They mention patience with an awkward relative at Christmas, or a friendship that has survived years of arguing about Brexit. They suggest someone who can disagree with you over dinner and still want to see you again. That quality is what most of us are actually looking for, and a party label tells you very little about it. Ten minutes of conversation tells you a great deal.

A first date works a bit like a small election. You can’t check everything about the other person, so you rely on signals. How do they speak to the waiter? How do they talk about an ex, or about people who vote differently? Do they listen, or wait for their turn? None of these is a policy, but together they answer the question that matters: would this person be decent to me when we disagree?

Voters, I suspect, do something similar. Very few people read a manifesto from cover to cover, and fewer still compare costings across three parties. They look for signals too. Does this lot share my sense of what’s fair? Do they treat their opponents with respect, or with contempt? If I ended up on the wrong side of one of their decisions, would they still take me seriously?

That is why Maria’s point matters. A list of good policies on care, housing and pensions is necessary, and she is right that each needs a credible answer on cost and delivery. But detail is the second conversation. The first is recognition. People need to see something of themselves in you before they will listen to the rest.

For Liberals, I think this suggests two things.

The first is to lead with the values that sit underneath the policies, and to say them plainly. Fairness, openness and kindness to people who disagree are not soft extras. For a lot of people they are the whole point, and they may be closer to what the party is for than any single policy on the list.

The second is that values have to show up in how you behave, not only in what you say. On a date, someone who says they’re open-minded and then sneers at your choice of newspaper has told you everything you need to know. A party that is visibly generous to people who don’t agree with it, in its leaflets, its debates and its arguments with rivals, is making a case that no policy document can make for it.

There is a warning in the dating comparison too. Charm without follow-through is a familiar disappointment. A good first impression gets you a second date, but you keep someone’s trust by doing what you said you would. That brings us back to Maria’s harder questions about paying for things and delivering them. Values open the door. Substance is what keeps it open.

So when people ask what the Liberal Democrats are for, the answer they’re most likely to recognise may not be a list. It may be closer to a description of the kind of person they’d want across the table: fair, curious, honest about trade-offs and kind to the people who see things differently.

* James Bradford writes about dating and relationships for LibDem Dating, an independent UK dating site for liberal-minded singles.