Leading does not mean I am never tired, and that is where they leave

Three or four weeks a year I have nothing left. Not a crisis, just a flat stretch in which I do not want to decide anything, and the structure has to hold anyway because holding is what it is for. Every man I have lost, I lost inside one of those weeks. They were perfectly comfortable with authority and had no idea at all what to do with a tired woman who still expected the duties done.

Fifty, Brooklyn, a court reporter, nineteen years of leading, three relationships and the longest of them eleven years.

What a good one does in that week is nothing clever. He carries on. The duties happen, the reports arrive, he does not ask whether we are all right, and he does not use the gap to renegotiate anything he agreed to in a better month. Then it passes, I come back, and everything is where I left it. The man I had for eleven years could do that, and it is most of the reason it was eleven years.

So I am asking about a competence rather than a preference. Can you hold a shape without being fed. If you need my energy in order to know what you are for, this ends the same way three times over.

Not looking for a man who wants a woman who is never off. Not looking to be looked after in those weeks, which is well meant and is not the thing. Not looking for somebody who reads a flat fortnight as the end of something, because after nineteen years I can tell you it is usually just February.