Everything about how we run our marriage was decided by our walls

We are a married couple in a railroad apartment with a third roommate and walls you could hear a thought through, and every single thing about how we run our marriage has been shaped by that fact rather than by anything either of us chose.

Thirty two and thirty four, Brooklyn, together six years, married two, with me leading for the past three. In an apartment like ours that means almost none of it is audible or visible to anybody. It is the calendar, the standards, what he does with his mornings, and a set of rules that would look like nothing at all to a person sitting in the room.

What we would like is other couples to spend a Saturday afternoon with. Daytime, deliberately. Our evenings are complicated and we have both had enough of trying to talk over music in a room full of strangers who are all being someone.

We are not experienced and we are not going to pretend. Three years of working it out from books and arguments. The single most useful thing anybody ever told us came from a couple we met once and never saw again, which is the reason we keep trying.

Not looking for a third, now or later. Not looking for anybody who wants to explain to my husband what he really is, which has happened twice and which he handles better than I do. Not looking to travel more than about an hour, which in this city rules out far more than it sounds like it does.