I have not been told no in fifteen years and it has ruined me

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.

West London, I run a division of a company that makes something extremely dull, I earn more than is good for me, divorced eight years, no children. On paper I am the man who should not want any of this.

But being agreed with all day is corrosive, and the parts of my life that are a mess are precisely the parts nobody has ever been in a position to challenge. What I want is a woman who will look at how I actually live, tell me plainly it is not good enough, and then hold me to whatever she decides instead.

I have done this once, four years, ending when she moved to be near her mother. She was completely uninterested in my job and mildly contemptuous of my car, and those were the best years I have had as an adult.

I am aware there is a version of this that finishes with a man handing over money, and I want to say clearly that I am not offering that and would walk out if it were asked for. Money is not what I am short of. Not looking for a woman impressed by any of the above. Not looking to be flattered. Not looking for anything that needs me to be interesting at half past eleven on a work night.