Fifty two, divorced, and this took eight months to press send on
Posted as eight_months_drafting
- Looking for
- patience from somebody who has done this longer than I have
- Experience
- None in practice. A great deal of thinking about it.
- Around
- Didsbury, Manchester
I wrote the first version of this in December. I have opened the file perhaps twenty times since, changed a word, and closed it again. What stopped me every time was the same specific fear, which is that my sister's friend is somewhere on this board and would recognise me from three sentences. I have decided that fear is not a good enough reason to spend another year doing nothing.
Fifty two, divorced two years ago after a long and mostly kind marriage, living in Didsbury with a garden I am slowly ruining. My experience is none. I want to be very clear, because I do not want anybody's time wasted. I have never done any of this with another person. I have known what I am since my twenties, I said nothing for thirty years, and now the house is quiet and I have run out of excuses.
What I want is to be led by somebody who will explain what they are doing and why. I want to go slowly. I want to be told when I have done something properly, which I know is an odd request to make of a stranger, and I am making it anyway. I can host on weeknights, I am free most weekends, and I would like the first meeting to be a conversation somewhere entirely ordinary.
I am not fragile. I have buried a parent, raised a family and run a department, and I am perfectly capable of hearing no. I am just new, and I would rather say so plainly than perform a confidence I have not earned.
Not looking for anybody who finds a woman my age novel and mentions it. Not looking for someone in a hurry. And not looking for anyone who wants photographs before a conversation.