Charlie Levine

Call me Charlie. Your doe-eyed, slightly mischievous libertine with an appetite for everything life has to offer. I'm an incorrigible flirt, a shameless lover of excess and a firm believer that some encounters have the power to change how we see ourselves and the world around us.

I've been told I have a particular talent for making reality feel a little more enchanted. Perhaps it's my magnetic presence, my curiosity about people or simply my refusal to accept that life should be an endless succession of routines and distractions. Whatever the explanation, I prefer experiences that leave us feeling a little more alive than when we arrived.

I've lived at least nine lives, and I'm not finished collecting them. I've wandered the globe, moved between underground dens and gilded houses, and found something fascinating in people from every imaginable walk of life. I have master's degrees, an insatiable appetite for ideas and a rather useful ability to move between different social worlds without losing myself in any of them. Call me a neophile: novelty, discovery and the unfamiliar have always held an irresistible appeal.

My tastes are wonderfully contradictory. I adore mid-century American poetry, Baldwin, Woolf and Hemingway, but I'm equally capable of losing an evening to terrible reality television. My musical affections wander between jazz, classical, house and techno. In art, I'm drawn to everyone from Yves Klein and Marlene Dumas to Georgia O'Keeffe and Pipilotti Rist. Give me a conversation about cutting-edge theory, followed by a night of dancing, and I'll be perfectly content.

I'm an opportunistic eater, too. A seven-course feast, an exceptional bottle of wine or an unexpected culinary discovery can make me positively evangelical about the pleasures of being alive. I love botanical gardens, forests, saunas, skinny dipping and fast cars. Beauty interests me, certainly, but so do absurdity, adventure and the unexpected.

As a companion, I'm fascinated by what happens when two people allow themselves to be genuinely curious about one another. I love teasing, banter and the delicious anticipation that can develop long before anything else. There's an alchemy to attraction that no amount of careful planning can manufacture, and discovering it is one of my favourite things.

I particularly enjoy dates that leave room for improvisation. We might begin with an extraordinary dinner, wander through a gallery, spend an afternoon at the spa or disappear on an adventure somewhere neither of us knows particularly well. I'm just as comfortable at an elegant social occasion as I am somewhere delightfully unconventional. And yes, I rather like staying for breakfast.

I'm also genuinely interested in meeting women and couples. The possibilities that emerge between different personalities fascinate me, provided everyone approaches the experience with openness, enthusiasm and respect.

I don't take this beautiful, absurd life for granted, and I certainly don't take myself too seriously. I'm curious, playful, occasionally a little scoundrel, and far too interested in what might happen next to settle for the mundane.

If there's one thing I hope we share, it's the conviction that life is richer when we allow ourselves to experience more of it. More beauty, more laughter, more discovery and perhaps a little more trouble than we originally intended.

Some would call that indulgence. I prefer to think of it as living.