Experience is what separates London from everywhere else. The women leading here have generally done this before, know exactly which mistake they are not repeating, and can say so in a single sentence. That makes the city easy to read and impossible to bluff in: a man padding a message out to sound seasoned is transparent inside a paragraph. Practical distance gets counted in changes on the tube, and which side of the river somebody lives on is a genuine question rather than small talk.
Posts here come from north London, south of the river, the east, the west and the commuter belt.
Near enough to matter, vague enough that nobody is placed on a map.
Women who lead in London
Setting out what leading actually means to them, before anybody writes back.
Hoping to find: somebody who has done this before and knows what he is like when told no
Twenty two years of leading, two long arrangements, both written down.
I run a small architecture practice and I write everything down, which turns out to be my entire approach to this as well. My last two arrangements each had a document. Not a contract in any legal sense. An agreed page of what happens, what does not, and what we do when one of us gets it wrong.
Hoping to find: one man, one house, and years to get there
Two long dynamics, the longer of them six years and lived in.
The thing I am looking for and the household I live in are the same object. I am not looking for a partner and then separately for a dynamic to run alongside it. I want one man in one house, where the arrangement simply is what daily life is like, with no version that gets switched on at eight and off again at eleven.
Hoping to find: a partner for the whole of it, with me leading, permanently
Divorced once. Two relationships since with me leading, six years and three.
What I want is a husband. I know how that reads on a board like this, and I have decided being misunderstood by the wrong men is cheaper than being understood by all of them. A partner, a shared life, an argument about a mortgage, and me leading it, which is not a modification bolted onto the marriage. It is the reason I want one.
Hoping to find: four sentences a friend of yours would recognise
Sixteen years, currently in a very bad mood about all of it.
I am going to be rude, because polite has produced nothing. If your message contains the word goddess, a list of things you are into, or a photograph of any part of you, it is already deleted and I did not read the rest. That is not a warning about the future. It is a description of my morning.
Hoping to find: a dynamic that runs on visits and continues between them
Two marriages with me leading, the second of them openly and much better.
Sixty three, and the one condition I will not move on is that I am never living with anybody again. I have done it twice, for decades each time, and I have since developed a serious fondness for a house that is entirely mine and stays exactly as I left it.
Hoping to find: a man who wants his life run properly rather than performed at
Four years leading, one dynamic of three, ended by distance.
Most of the discipline in my last dynamic was about breakfast. Whether he had eaten it, what was in it, and whether he had gone to bed when we agreed he would. That is not a joke at my own expense. It is precisely what I want to run.
Hoping to find: a man whose week is as strange as mine, or who works from home
Eight years, three relationships with me leading, two ended over shifts.
I work nights, four on and four off, which means my Sunday is frequently a Wednesday and my evening can be eleven in the morning. Every dynamic I have had has run into this and two of them died of it, so I am putting it where you cannot miss it.
Hoping to find: the eleventh month of something rather than the first week
Two long dynamics, the second of them six years.
Nobody writes advertisements about the middle of this, so here is one. Wednesday, half seven, I am in from work and he has been home an hour. Dinner is on because Wednesday is his. I ask three questions about his day and he answers all three properly, because not answering properly has a consequence we agreed two years ago and have never once had to revisit.
Hoping to find: a practical man who wants to know what is expected and then do it
Twenty years married with it unspoken, two relationships since with it stated.
I do not use the word. Not out of shame and not because there is anything wrong with it, but because every single time I have used it the man opposite me has stopped hearing anything else I said. I tell people I run things. It is accurate, it is dull, and it filters beautifully.
Hoping to find: a man who can say what he wants without a script over the top of it
One relationship of three years with me leading. Eight months single.
Three of the last four men who wrote to me arrived fully costumed. A title in the opening line, a script for how our first meeting would go, and a paragraph telling me what I like. It is meant as flattery and it lands as being handed a part in a play I have not read.
Hoping to find: a woman who will look at how I live and say plainly that it is not good enough
One dynamic of four years, ended when she moved to care for her mother.
What I want, more than anything else I could put on a list, is to be told no. I am fifty five and I have not heard it properly in about fifteen years. Everybody at work agrees with me, my friends stopped arguing some time ago, and I have become steadily worse as a person as a result.
Hoping to find: a woman who runs things and expects a lot, with time for me to catch up
Ten years in my twenties and thirties, then twelve years of nothing.
I was in this from twenty five to thirty five, then I married somebody who did not want it, and I made the decision to let it go, and I did. I do not regret the marriage. It ended two years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this. Twelve years is a long time to be away from anything.
Hoping to find: a female led relationship with all the ordinary parts left in
Six years, two dynamics, the longer of them three years.
If I were you I would not read this either, so here are the three questions I would ask me, answered in advance, and you can decide from those whether the rest is worth your evening.
Hoping to find: a first conversation with someone who will not make me feel late
None with another person. Two years of reading and a draft a month that never went anywhere.
Two years of reading boards like this one and this is the first thing I have ever written on any of them. There are about twenty drafts sitting in a notes app on my phone, none of them sent, and I could not tell you what stopped me on any particular evening.
Hoping to find: somebody direct enough to give me a limit and mean it
One dynamic of two years, which taught me more than the four before it.
I have been told, by three different women and in very nearly the same words, that I write too much. This post is a fourth draft and it is half the length of the first one, and I am aware that mentioning that is itself the problem.
Hoping to find: a relationship where she decides, built slowly and out of ordinary things
One dynamic, two years, ended amicably when she emigrated.
I am going to write to you about nothing that marks me out as this sort of man, because everything else I could say has been said to you four hundred times this month by people who mean it exactly as much as I do and are therefore indistinguishable from me.
Hoping to find: a woman who leads, for something ongoing, with nothing hidden from anybody
Married nineteen years. Open by agreement for three, after two spent discussing it.
My wife wrote the second half of this and I wrote the first, and the reason we are doing it that way is that she does not want what I want and has been extremely decent about it for three years.
Hoping to find: one man who wants to belong somewhere, over years rather than months
Together nineteen years, fourteen with a structure, one previous arrangement of five.
There are two of us and there has been a third before, and what we are describing is genuinely a place in a household rather than somebody to see occasionally. That distinction loses us most people at the first message and we would rather lose them there than in month six.
Hoping to find: people to eat with who do not need the whole thing explained
Together twenty seven years, with one of us leading for most of them.
We are two women, both retired, and we have run the household this way for so long that neither of us can now remember agreeing to it. Nothing was negotiated. It settled, over about three years in our late thirties, and then simply stayed.
Hoping to find: women who did not want this at first and now do, or decided not to
Nine years together. Seven months of an unanswered question.
He has asked me to lead and I have not said yes. I have not said no either. We have been sitting in that position for about seven months, and I am posting because I would like to hear from women who were once exactly here and are now somewhere else, in either direction.
Hoping to find: friends, ideally couples, ideally within a bus ride
Three years together, all of it with her leading. One data point between us.
I answered a post very like this one three years ago, and I am now the other half of the couple writing it, which is either encouraging or alarming depending on your temperament.
Hoping to find: one quiet hour a week, with nothing at the end of it
One arrangement of three years where this was allowed to be the whole of it.
What I want is to kneel, in silence, in a room where somebody is getting on with her evening, once or twice a week. I have never worked out how to describe that without sounding either holy or absurd. It is neither. It is the only thing I have found that quietens my head.
Hoping to find: a standing evening, jobs that are mine, and somebody who notices
Five years of one evening a week, ended when she moved north.
What I miss is the Tuesday. Not the dramatic parts, which I could take or leave. Tuesday, when I did the ironing while she went through the week's diary out loud, and nothing at all was said that would have meant anything to a stranger listening. That was five years, and it ended in February when she moved to Yorkshire to look after her mother.
Hoping to find: a couple where she leads, and a place in their ordinary week
About a year with a couple who then moved away.
What I would like is to be useful to a couple, in a household where the woman leads, and I will be honest that part of the appeal is that there would be two of them and one of me. I have thought about why for a long time and the nearest I can get is that I want to join something already standing rather than build one from nothing.
Hoping to find: a standard, an inspection, and a consequence that is not a sulk
One arrangement of about a year that collapsed for lack of any rules.
I would like to do somebody's laundry, ironing, weekly shop and bins. Not as a metaphor and not as a scene. The actual dull half of a week, done reliably, by me, so that she can spend her Sunday on something better.
Hoping to find: somebody to feed properly, on her terms, for a long time
One arrangement of five years, entirely domestic.
What I have to offer is dinner, four nights a week, cooked properly and on time, and a kitchen left cleaner than I found it. I have spent a year trying to say that on boards like this without it sounding like an advertisement for staff, and I have not managed it yet, so I am going to say it plainly and let you decide.
Hoping to find: somebody who knows what she wants planted and will say when I get it wrong
Forty years of being handed a plan by somebody who knew what they wanted.
I would like to take over a garden. Somebody else's, to her instructions, over years rather than a season, with her deciding what goes where and me doing the digging and being told plainly when I have got it wrong.
You can read the board all evening and still not be on it. A post of your own, read by women and men who actually live near you, goes on the platform this site connects to.