I will not do this across the whole city and I have stopped apologising

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.

Thirty five, Queens, I work in logistics, seven years of leading, two dynamics, the longer of them three years. I have tried the long crossing twice. Both times the man swore it was nothing, and both times the frequency quietly halved, and then halved again, and then we had a sad conversation about scheduling that was really about something else.

So I am posting for Queens, Brooklyn and the eastern half of Manhattan, and if that sounds narrow in a city this size, consider how many people live inside that circle. It is more than sufficient.

What I want is frequent rather than intense. Two or three evenings a week, ordinary ones, with a structure that runs through the whole week instead of switching on when we are in the same room. Frequency is the only thing that has ever made this work for me, and it is the first casualty of a long trip.

Not looking to be persuaded that the journey is fine. Not looking for a man who wants to see me twice a month and call it a dynamic. Not looking for anyone planning to move within the year, which I ask about early and which people find blunt.