She wears the trousers, our friends say, roughly forty times a year

Every friend we have treats it as a running joke. She wears the trousers, is the general shape of it, said fondly and about forty times a year, and neither of us has ever corrected anybody. We are two women. One of us leads. It is not a joke and it is the most serious thing in our life.

Twenty eight and thirty, east London, together four years, renting a flat from a landlord who visits far too often. One of us decides, the other is happier than she has ever been, and we worked the whole thing out more or less by accident about two years ago.

What we want is people who will not laugh. That is a low bar and we have failed to clear it inside our own circle, which is loving and completely useless on this particular subject. Other couples ideally. Near us ideally, because neither of us drives and anything past a certain hour becomes an ordeal.

We do not have much to teach anybody. Four years together, two of them deliberate, and a great deal of it invented as we went, since nearly everything written about a woman leading assumes there is a man on the other end of it.

Not looking for a third and never will be. Not looking for anyone who wants us to explain ourselves as a curiosity. Not looking for advice from people twenty years in who have forgotten what not knowing feels like, though we would be glad to be proved wrong about that.