The word means nine things on this board, so here is mine

Since the word means about nine different things on this board, here is what it means when I use it. I make the decisions in a relationship, my judgement is the one that settles a disagreement, and he is answerable to me for how he lives. I do not mean an evening, a costume, or a menu of activities, and I have wasted years discovering that other people meant exactly those.

Thirty three, the Bronx, I am a paramedic, six years of leading, one relationship of four years that ended when he moved home to look after his father.

In practice: I decide what our weekends are. I set standards about his health, his apartment and the commitments he keeps, and I follow them up, which is the part everybody forgets. He tells me things he would rather not tell me, on a schedule, because that was the agreement. None of it is dramatic and most of it would bore a spectator into a coma.

My job makes me unavailable in blocks and completely available in others, so I need somebody who can live inside a schedule he did not choose. I am also, for reasons anybody in my line of work will recognise, deeply unimpressed by drama in a relationship.

Not looking for a man who wants to be broken down, a phrase I see constantly and which describes nothing I would ever do to anyone. Not looking to be tested. Not looking for somebody who wants the arrangement without the relationship around it, since for me the arrangement is only the shape the relationship takes.