Everyone assumes they know what a man my age wants. Wrong direction

Every woman I have written to has assumed she knows what a man of twenty six is after, and every one of them has been wrong in the same direction. I am not here to be humiliated. I find the whole idea faintly grim, and saying so seems to disqualify me from a category I never applied to join.

Twenty six, north London, I work in the back office of a bank doing something with reconciliations that I will not describe further out of kindness. I share a flat with two friends and a boiler with strong views.

What I actually want is to be led in the parts of my life I am demonstrably bad at. Money. Sleep. Whether to take the promotion. What I eat between Monday and Friday. I am capable and disorganised in exactly the combination that wastes a decade, and the happiest I have been was six months under a woman who simply told me what my evenings were for.

That ended when her contract finished and she went home, and because I was twenty four and handled the ending like somebody who was twenty four.

So: something long, domestic, and mostly unexciting from the outside. I do not need any of it in a bedroom to feel led, though I am ruling nothing out. Not looking for a woman who wants a performance of misery. Not looking to be called a boy. Not looking for anybody who finds my age charming, since that is only a polite way of not taking me seriously.