Three years ago I answered one of these. Now I am half of the couple writing one

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.

The short version is that she posted, I wrote back badly, and she replied anyway because one line in the middle of my message was honest. We talked for four months before anything else happened at all. I moved in last spring.

Part of the reason we are posting is to say to the men reading this that the boring, specific, faintly embarrassed message is the one that works. Mine was six sentences and one of them was about my father dying, which I did not mean to put in and did not take out.

What we are actually after now is other people. Friends, ideally couples, ideally near enough that dinner is a bus rather than an expedition. She is thirty eight and leads, I am thirty three and do not, and after three years the novelty has been replaced by something much better and much harder to describe at a party.

Not looking for a third. Not looking to advise anybody, given that we have exactly one data point between us. Not looking for anything at a weekend gathering, because neither of us enjoys a room where everybody is being somebody.