Both retired, and we have done this quietly at home for twenty five years
Posted as thirty_years_flat
- Looking for
- one other couple, near our own age, before we get much older
- Experience
- Forty one years together, twenty five of them with a structure in it.
- Around
- the north, Moscow
We are sixty three and sixty five, married forty one years, in the same flat in the north for thirty of them. For twenty five years there has been a structure in this marriage that has never been outside these walls. We learned it from nobody. There was nobody to learn it from when we started, so we made it up between us, and we have since discovered that a good deal of what we invented has proper names.
We have never met another couple who do any of this. Not once, in twenty five years. Our children are grown and elsewhere and would be appalled, or perhaps not, and we are not going to find out.
What we would like, while we are both still in good health and good temper, is to meet one other couple around our own age and simply talk. We have questions we have carried for decades and nobody to put them to. We would also, if we are honest, quite like to be told that the way we do things is not strange, or to be told that it is, by somebody who would know.
She has led since about the fifth year of the marriage. He describes it as the best administrative decision of his life. Nothing physical is being proposed, now or later. Conversation, dinner, perhaps a long friendship if we are lucky.
Not looking for younger people, kindly meant. Not looking for anybody who would want us to explain ourselves as though we were a curiosity. Not looking to be anybody's evidence of anything.