Our first attempt cost us a friendship, so here are our rules now
Posted as the_rules_we_broke
- Looking for
- another couple, met as strangers, on terms agreed before anything happens
- Experience
- Thirteen years together, six with this, one attempt that went badly.
- Around
- inside the ring road, Moscow
Everybody here does it through people they already know. We did it that way too, four years ago, with friends of eight years standing, and it was a disaster in the slowest possible way. Nothing terrible happened. Two of the four of us wanted it more than the other two, nobody said so at the time, and the whole thing curdled over about five months and took the friendship with it. We still cross the street.
Thirty nine and forty one, inside the ring road, together thirteen years, six years of this. She leads, he does not. So we are doing the opposite this time and writing to strangers, which everybody warns against here and which we now think is safer for exactly the reason people say it is not. There is no friendship to lose.
Our rules, which are not negotiable and which we would ask you to match. Every conversation happens with all four people present, including the awkward ones. Anybody can stop anything at any point with no explanation owed and no discussion afterwards. We meet at least three times with nothing happening. And each couple talks privately after every meeting and reports honestly, out loud, to the other two.
That reads as bureaucratic. It is. Bureaucracy is what we did not have last time. Not looking for a single person. Not looking for anyone who finds all this excessive. Not looking to move quickly, and if that is a disappointment then better now than in five months.