Two years, one evening a week, and I never learned her surname
- Looking for
- the same arrangement again, with the anonymity agreed rather than assumed
- Experience
- Eleven years, three dynamics, one of them entirely anonymous by agreement.
- Around
- the south east, London
We met through one of these apps, agreed at the start that neither of us wanted anything outside the arrangement, and kept to it for two years. One evening a week, a structure we both took seriously, and a deliberate wall around everything else: no surnames, no workplaces, nobody else's friends. It ended last year when her circumstances changed, and I still think it was the healthiest thing I have done.
Forty four, the south east, switch, eleven years in, three arrangements and that one the longest.
People find it cold when I describe it. It was not. Inside the wall there was a great deal of care and a great deal of honesty, more than in either of my other two, precisely because nothing outside was being managed.
So I am looking for something similar, and I am saying so at the start rather than discovering in month four that we want different things. Either direction, a fixed weekly evening, real structure, agreed limits about how far into each other's lives this goes.
Not looking for anybody who wants this to grow into an ordinary relationship. Not looking to be somebody's secret, which is a different thing and much worse. And not looking for a person who will agree to the boundary and then keep testing it gently for a year.