Nine years of leading and I am tired, and nowhere lets a woman say that

Nine years of me leading and I am tired. That is a sentence I have not been able to say anywhere, because every space built for this assumes the woman is either delighted or being pestered, and I am neither. I am simply tired, we are still here, and I would like to talk to somebody who has been through the same stretch and out the other side.

We are forty five and forty seven, west London, married eleven years, nine of them with me running it. His idea originally. Both of ours now.

He is not the problem. He is precisely what he promised to be. The problem is that deciding is work, I do it all day at my job as well, and there are weeks when the last thing I want is one more person waiting to be told. We have tried handing some of it back and it makes us both unhappy in a different and worse way.

So: other couples somewhere past year five, particularly the woman in them, who would compare notes. Not advice from people six months in. Not a solution either, since I doubt there is one. Company, and the reassurance that this is an ordinary phase of a long arrangement rather than the beginning of the end of it.

We are not looking for anybody to join us and not looking to play with anyone. Writing rather than meeting is fine. Not looking for a lecture about how I should simply be firmer, which is what the last person we told suggested, and which is exactly the sort of help that is not.