I write everything down, including this, and men find that either restful or airless

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.

Fifty six, west London, widowed, twenty two years of leading in one form or another, and slowly rejoining the world across the past eighteen months.

Formality suits me. Address, standing rules, one fixed evening, and a written review every few months where both of us say what is not working while it is still small enough to say. Men find that either intensely restful or completely airless, and both reactions are correct for the person having them.

I am not looking for a project and I have no appetite left for teaching. Somebody who has done this before, or who at the very least knows what he is like when he is told no, suits me far better than enthusiasm. I have had enthusiasm. It evaporates around the third time something is inconvenient.

Not looking for anybody under forty, which is arbitrary, and which I am keeping. Not looking for a man who wants to be surprised. Not looking for anything that has to be renegotiated weekly, because that is not a dynamic, it is a standing meeting.