I live forty minutes east and I am not moving back in
Posted as towards_the_hills
- Looking for
- somebody who genuinely does not mind leaving the city
- Experience
- Twenty two years, three arrangements, the longest of them nine.
- Around
- the east of the city, Lyon
I have a house forty minutes east of the city with a garden and a workshop and no neighbours who can hear anything, and it is far and away the best thing I own. It is also, on five years of evidence, the single largest obstacle to anybody joining it.
Fifty, dominant, twenty two years in. What I have learned is that people say the distance is nothing in April and mean it sincerely, and then in November it is dark at five and the enthusiasm quietly goes. That is not a character flaw. It is just true, and I have stopped being disappointed by it.
So I would rather be plain. Being with me means coming out here most of the time, because the whole point of the arrangement I want is domestic. Standing rules, service, weekends that begin on Friday and are not interrupted, and long unhurried stretches that a city flat cannot give anybody.
I will drive in, and I do, and I am glad to for the first several meetings. I am simply not going to build the thing itself around a person who has to be back for the last tram.
It is genuinely beautiful out here and roughly half the people I talk to have never once gone in that direction, which I find remarkable in a city with mountains an hour away. Not looking for anyone who will try it and then start proposing we meet halfway. Not looking for a weeknight arrangement. Not looking to be somebody's countryside phase.