Retired couple, thirty years of this, offering only conversation
Posted as quiet_house
- Looking for
- younger people who want to ask questions of somebody older
- Experience
- Thirty one years, a household dynamic throughout.
- Around
- the commuter belt, London
We are both retired, we have been doing this in one form or another for thirty one years, and the thing we can offer is neither exciting nor physical: we will answer questions honestly over a pot of tea.
Sixties, out in the commuter belt, married a long time, one of us leads and one of us does not, and the arrangement has survived a redundancy, an illness and a house move, which we think is the real test. We are not looking for anybody to join anything. We want to be clear about that because a post from an older couple gets read a particular way. There is nothing on offer here except talk, and nothing is for sale, arranged or otherwise.
We should be plain about what we are not. We are not going to be anybody's dominant or anybody's submissive, we do not want to watch anything, and if a conversation starts heading that way we will say so once and then stop replying. What prompted this is meeting a young couple last year, entirely by accident through neither of us being subtle in a bookshop queue, and discovering how much they wanted somebody to ask. Nobody had told them the ordinary things. What you do when it stops working for a while. What you do when one of you is ill. How you carry it through twenty years of jobs and family without it either taking over or quietly dying.
Nobody told us either. We worked it out slowly and wasted a decade being frightened of ourselves. So if you are starting, and you want somebody older to be plain with you, write. We are slow to answer and we always answer.