The best year of my life was made almost entirely of washing up

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.

Thirty six, Manhattan, I work in nonprofit finance and share a two bedroom with a roommate who is essentially never here. That dynamic ran two years and ended when she moved north for work and I could not follow because of my mother's health.

What I want is the same shape again. A woman who leads, a set of things that are mine to do, and a standard that is genuinely enforced. Enforcement is the part people skip and it is the part that makes it real, because a rule nobody ever checks is only a preference with better lighting.

I have no interest in being publicly anything. On the street I am a man walking to work. Inside the apartment I would like the arrangement to be complete and unambiguous, and I would like to be told off rather than sighed at.

Not looking for anything involving other people. Not looking for a woman who wants me to design the dynamic and hand it to her, which I have been asked to do twice and which is precisely backwards. Not looking for a first meeting anywhere private, for her sake more than mine.