Seeking · United States
Nowhere else produces the sheer message volume a dominant woman in New York deals with, and the effect is the opposite of what men expect: the more of them write, the less any single message gets read. Women here become selective early and stay that way, so the post that works is the specific, faintly odd one that could not have been sent to anyone else. Crossing the city is its own filter. Somebody in Queens and somebody in north Jersey are not really conducting the same search.
Posts here come from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and north Jersey. Near enough to matter, vague enough that nobody is placed on a map.
Setting out what leading actually means to them, before anybody writes back.
four_hundred_eleven Manhattan
Hoping to find: one long relationship, run by me, made mostly of ordinary things
Twelve years leading, two relationships that lasted and several that did not.
I counted for a month, because I wanted to be able to say this with a number attached to it. Four hundred and eleven messages. I opened sixty. I answered nine. Two of the nine turned into conversations and one of those is still going.
lead_from_a_chair Queens
Hoping to find: a man who can be directed rather than one who wants to be handled
Thirteen years leading, one relationship of nine years.
I use a wheelchair, and men on this board handle that in one of two ways. Either they decide I must need looking after and write to me as though the arrangement is care with a costume over it, or they overcorrect so hard that they will not mention it at all and then panic about a step. What almost nobody manages is the ordinary version, in which I direct and he does, and sometimes what he does is carry something.
i_answer_on_sundays Queens
Hoping to find: a man who can live inside a structure that mostly runs while we are apart
Eleven years leading, two long relationships, one bad burnout in between.
I answer messages on Sunday afternoons and at no other time. Not to be difficult and not as a test. It is the only way I have found to do this without it eating a working week, and every woman I know who leads has arrived at some version of the same rule.
somebody_has_to_vouch the Bronx
Hoping to find: a man somebody who knows him would be willing to describe honestly
Twenty years leading, and every one of them arranged through people I knew.
I have not answered a message from a stranger in six years. Everybody I have been involved with came through somebody who knew us both and was willing to say something plain about him when I asked. In a city this size that is the only filter I have found that does any real work.
crossing_is_the_filter Queens
Hoping to find: two or three ordinary evenings a week with somebody who lives near me
Seven years leading, two dynamics, both tested to destruction by distance.
I live in Queens and I will not do this with somebody in north Jersey, and I have stopped apologising for saying so. It is not snobbery, it is arithmetic. An hour and a half each way, twice a week, is a hundred and fifty hours a year that both people have to genuinely want, and in my experience only one of us ever still does by month four.
what_i_mean_by_lead the Bronx
Hoping to find: a man who wants his life answerable to somebody, in the dull sense
Six years leading, one relationship of four years.
Since the word means about nine different things on this board, here is what it means when I use it. I make the decisions in a relationship, my judgement is the one that settles a disagreement, and he is answerable to me for how he lives. I do not mean an evening, a costume, or a menu of activities, and I have wasted years discovering that other people meant exactly those.
Saying plainly what they hope for, what they are offering, and what they are not.
four_nights_elsewhere Brooklyn
Hoping to find: an arrangement that runs in writing from Monday to Thursday
One dynamic of two years, conducted almost entirely at a distance.
I am on a site in another state from Monday morning until late on Thursday, every week, and have been for four years. That is the fact which ends most conversations here, so it goes at the top rather than in the middle. Three nights a week at home is not much to build a household on, and I have watched two promising conversations work that out in silence and simply stop.
desks_facing Brooklyn
Hoping to find: to start as friends, because that is the only version I have seen work
One dynamic of four years that grew out of three years of friendship.
The only dynamic I have ever had began at a job. We sat facing each other for three years, became friends, stayed friends after I left, and then one evening about eighteen months later she said something I have thought about roughly weekly ever since. There was no approach, no first message, and no board.
i_know_what_number Queens
Hoping to find: a relationship where she leads and I am useful in unglamorous ways
One dynamic of three years, ended when she took a job in another state.
You have probably had forty of these today, so I will make this cost you as little as possible. Thirty four, Queens, structural engineer, free most evenings, and I am not going to tell you a single thing about what I like until you have decided whether I am a person worth the time.
since_paper Brooklyn
Hoping to find: a woman who wants a settled man with a great deal of time
Four dynamics across thirty odd years, the longest of them twelve.
I answered my first advertisement of this kind when it was printed on paper and you replied by post, and a fortnight passed between letters. I mention it not out of nostalgia but because it made me a patient correspondent, which is honestly the only advantage I still hold over the men writing to you today, most of whom are thirty years younger and considerably better looking.
not_that_vocabulary Queens
Hoping to find: authority that is respectful, which is a surprisingly hard thing to describe
One dynamic of eight months that ended over exactly this.
Almost everything offered to me in three years has been some form of humiliation, it is not what I asked for, and I have come to suspect the real problem is that I have no good way of saying what I do want. Respectful authority sounds like a contradiction written down. It is not one. It is a woman deciding things and expecting them done, with no part of it depending on my being made small first.
list_im_not_sending Brooklyn
Hoping to find: standing responsibilities rather than instructions in the moment
Almost none, and I would rather say that than dress it up.
I have a list of things I am interested in and I am not going to send it, because the list is the least interesting thing about me and it is also identical to four hundred other lists. Everything on mine is on all of them. Sending it tells you nothing except that I can read.
year_of_the_dishes Manhattan
Hoping to find: a set of duties that are mine and a standard that is actually enforced
One dynamic of two years, ended by a job in another city.
The best year of my life was made almost entirely of doing the dishes. I know exactly how that reads. Every night, without discussion, while she talked at me about her day from the other room, and if I did them badly she said so at once, and that was the whole architecture of it.
Partners searching together, with both of them present in the post rather than one speaking for two.
moved_and_knew_nobody north Jersey
Hoping to find: two or three couples to know properly rather than a circle
Married nineteen years, twelve of them with her leading.
We moved here two years ago for my wife's work, bringing a marriage, a dog and a twelve year arrangement that neither of us has ever had to explain to anybody, because everyone who needed to know already did. Where we came from we had four couples we could be entirely ourselves around. Here we have a very good dentist and nobody at all.
changed_when_ill the Bronx
Hoping to find: couples who have had to rebuild theirs around something
Married twenty six years, fourteen of them structured, and one long interruption.
Four years ago my husband became seriously ill and everything we had built over a decade stopped working inside a fortnight, because most of it depended on things he could no longer do. We could either let it go or rebuild it, and rebuilding it while he was frightened and I was exhausted is the hardest thing either of us has done. It is better now than it was before, and I would not have believed that at the time.
People whose interest is in being useful to someone. Domestic, practical, devotional. Never paid, and never for hire.
letters_nobody_writes Manhattan
Hoping to find: a woman whose paperwork is drowning her, and correction when I get it wrong
Six years handling the correspondence of one woman who could not bear it.
I would like to be the person who argues with the insurance company. Who reads the lease properly, who sits on hold, who writes the letter that finally gets something corrected, and who keeps the folder that means nobody ever has to look for anything twice. It is the least romantic offer on this board and it is the one thing I am genuinely good at.
packages_and_plumbers Queens
Hoping to find: to belong to somebody's week and be told plainly when I get it wrong
Two years running the logistics of one very busy woman's life.
The thing I want to be is the person who waits in for the plumber. Who takes the delivery, argues with the building, sits through a four hour window, and absorbs every small logistical humiliation that living in this city generates and that a woman working sixty hour weeks has no time for.
twice_a_day_dog Queens
Hoping to find: a woman who would actually use me rather than thank me for offering
Two arrangements that both started exactly this way.
The offer is a dog, twice a day, every day, without fail, for as long as it is needed. That is an odd thing to lead with on a board like this, and it is also the most reliable fact about me.
the_one_with_the_car north Jersey
Hoping to find: a task, a standard, and being the person she does not think about twice
One long arrangement built almost entirely out of driving and lifting.
In this city almost nobody has a car, I have one, and it turns out to be the single most useful thing about me. The airport at five in the morning. The hardware run. Moving a chair from her sister's place. The trip out to sit with somebody in a hospital an hour away when the trains would take three.
no_sex_and_i_mean_it Brooklyn
Hoping to find: direction, honesty, and correction delivered in the moment
Two arrangements, one of eight years and one of two.
There is no sexual element to what I am asking for, and every time I say so people assume I am being coy or protecting myself. I am not. It is the plain description. I want to be of use to a woman, under her direction, and I want none of it to end up in a bedroom.
everything_green Brooklyn
Hoping to find: a standing weekly duty in a home that is not mine, inspected properly
Two arrangements, one of five years, both built out of small weekly duties.
I keep things alive. Plants mostly, on a fire escape and two windowsills, several of them older than my marriage turned out to be, and I would honestly rather they were somebody else's things than mine. That sentence has taken me four years to write without dressing it up into something more impressive.
install_days Manhattan
Hoping to find: to be told exactly what to do by somebody whose work needs doing
Three years of install days and hauling for one artist.
I want to be the pair of hands for a woman who makes things. Stretching canvases, hauling, install days, standing in a freight elevator holding one end of something for forty minutes while she decides. I have done it and it is the only work I have ever done where I did not once look at a clock.
Reading a board is the easy half of this. Four pieces cover the half that decides whether anybody writes back, from both chairs at the table.
Twenty more cities, each read on its own terms.
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