The actual arithmetic of my inbox, since nobody believes me

Here is the arithmetic, since nobody on the writing end of it ever believes me. In a normal week I get somewhere between forty and sixty messages. I open perhaps a dozen. I answer two. Of those two, one stops replying the moment he finds out I want to talk about his job and his mother before anything else.

That is not cruelty and it is not a shortage of decent men. It is what happens when several hundred people write the same message to the same small number of women. The ones I open are the ones that could not have been sent to anybody else.

Forty four, north London, I have led in two long relationships and I have no interest at all in an evening. Since I am being useful for once: what gets read is something specific about your week, one honest sentence about what you are hoping for, and no list of activities. What does not get read is anything opening with a title, anything describing my photographs back to me, and anything enormous that never once mentions what you do on a Tuesday.

The part nobody says out loud is that the volume is flattering for about a month and then it becomes admin. I have lost whole evenings to it. If I am slow, that is why, and it is not a test of your patience.

Not looking for a man who wants to be told what to do and has never in his life decided anything unprompted. Not looking to be anybody's first experiment in whether he means it.