This is not going to be a relationship, and I will say so now
Posted as not_a_relationship
- Looking for
- a service arrangement with clear edges and no romantic component
- Experience
- Seventeen years, four arrangements, none romantic and all of them long.
- Around
- the city centre, Birmingham
Four arrangements in seventeen years, the shortest of them two years, and not one of them was a relationship. That is not because they went wrong. It is the design, and it is what I am looking for again.
Fifty, city centre, with a life that is already full and a partner of many years who knows exactly what this is and has no involvement in it whatsoever.
What I offer is real and quite narrow. Regular structure, standing duties, my full attention on the days we have agreed, and a genuine investment in how somebody is doing. What I do not offer is a partnership. No holidays, no meeting anybody, and no expectation that I will be reachable at two in the morning because something has happened.
The people who have done well out of this were people whose emotional lives were already settled elsewhere and who wanted one specific thing done properly. The one person who found it painful took the arrangement as a starting point and hoped it would grow into something else, and I should have seen that coming in the first month rather than the ninth.
So I am being direct. If you are looking for something that becomes a relationship eventually, I am not it, and there is nothing wrong with wanting that. Not looking for anybody currently in a difficult patch. And not looking for somebody who has not been straight with their own partner about being here.