Everybody is so relaxed about this that none of it feels serious
- Looking for
- somebody who treats an arrangement as weighty rather than casual
- Experience
- Eight years, three dynamics, all of them more casual than I wanted.
- Around
- Friedrichshain, Berlin
The openness here has a cost that nobody mentions. When nothing is shocking and everything is permitted and terms are exchanged as easily as swapping phone numbers, it becomes very hard to make anything feel significant. All three of my arrangements were entirely reasonable, entirely negotiated and entirely weightless. Nobody ever seemed to think any of it mattered very much, including, eventually, me.
Thirty six, Friedrichshain, switch, eight years in.
I am not asking for drama. I am asking for gravity, which is a different thing: somebody for whom the agreement is a real commitment rather than a sensible arrangement between two adults with compatible interests. Ceremony is not the point. Consequence is, and so is the plain sense that something real would be lost if either of us simply walked off.
What I want is one arrangement, either direction, that both of us take seriously enough to be inconvenienced by. Structure, a weekly evening, obligations that hold even when neither of us feels like it.
Not looking for anybody who is very relaxed about everything. Not looking for a person who would describe what we agreed as easygoing. And not looking to be told that taking it seriously is intense, which has been said to me twice as though it settled something.