I counted them for a month so I could say this with a number attached

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.

I am not telling you that to boast. It is the least flattering fact about dating as a woman who leads in this city, because what it means is that the pile is not a set of choices. It is weather. Somewhere inside it there were probably twenty men I would have liked very much, and I will never know which ones they were.

Forty three, Manhattan, I work in hospital administration, twelve years of leading. What made the nine different was almost never the quality of the writing. It was specificity. One detail that could not have come from any other life.

What I want is a long relationship where I run things, and where the running is mostly about ordinary life: weekends, how his week is organised, what standards hold in the house when neither of us is in a good mood. I am not interested in an evening, a weekend, or a trial period.

Not looking for a man who writes a beautiful first message and goes quiet in week five, which is reliably what the beautiful ones do. Not looking for anyone who wants to be told what he already knows about himself. Not looking to be somebody's proof that women like me exist.