I am out of the country two thirds of the year and it is not changing
- Looking for
- somebody who wants something intense and infrequent rather than steady
- Experience
- Nine years, two dynamics, both of them across long absences.
- Around
- Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin
I work in blocks: six weeks away, three weeks here, more or less continuously, and it has been that way for a decade and pays for a life I like. Eight months of my year happens somewhere else. This is the fact that ends conversations, so it goes first rather than in the middle.
Thirty seven, Prenzlauer Berg, switch, nine years in, two arrangements both of them built around exactly this.
What works is a structure that is entirely portable: obligations that continue while I am away, contact at fixed times allowing for the hours, and then three weeks where we are actually in the same city and everything is concentrated. What does not work is trying to run a normal weekly arrangement with enormous holes in it, which I did for a year and which slowly convinced somebody that they were not important.
Either direction. I lead when I am away, oddly, and rather less when I am here.
Not looking for anybody who needs regular physical presence, which is entirely reasonable and rules this out. Not looking for a person who thinks the absences will get shorter. And not looking to be checked up on, which is the shape this took the first time and which poisoned it.