What I want is a husband, and I am aware how that reads here

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.

Thirty nine, north London, I run operations for a small manufacturer, divorced once from a man who found my competence exhausting, and I have led in two relationships since.

What I need is a man with a life worth directing. Work he does not hate, friends who would notice if he vanished, opinions of his own, and the ability to disagree with me in a sentence instead of a fortnight of sulking. The strangest thing men believe about women like me is that we want somebody with nothing inside him.

In practice the leading is domestic and financial and social far more than anything else. I decide, he carries it out, and we have the argument in advance rather than afterwards. I check in every week, because I have learned that anything nobody reviews quietly rots.

Not looking for weekends. Not looking for a man who wants the arrangement rather than the woman. Not looking for someone who will agree to a house move and then be silently unhappy about it for two years, since that is precisely how my marriage ended and I recognise the shape of it now.