If you want something permanent by autumn, I am not the person
- Looking for
- somebody content to spend a year finding out
- Experience
- Seventeen years, three dynamics, none of them shorter than three years.
- Around
- the west, London
About one in four of the people who write to me want something formal and permanent, and want it soon, and describe wanting it as evidence of how serious they are. I understand the impulse completely and I will not do it. Everything I have that lasted took a year to become what it eventually was, and the two that fell apart were both arrangements that were named early because naming it felt like progress.
Fifty one, the west, dominant, seventeen years in, three arrangements and none of them shorter than three years.
So the first year with me has no title in it. There are expectations, a weekly evening, real structure and a great deal of honesty, and there is no ceremony attached to any of it until both of us have seen the other in a bad month.
I am not cold about this. I am extremely committed once I am committed, which is exactly why I do not do it in October about somebody I met in August.
Not looking for anybody whose main question is how quickly this becomes official. Not looking for somebody who needs a word to feel secure. And not looking for a person who reads patience as a lack of enthusiasm, because the two look nothing alike from where I am standing.