A year of looking and nothing, so it is not only hard from your side

The men on this board write a great deal about how hard it is to be answered. I want to say, from the other side, that a year of looking has produced nothing for me either, and that the difficulty is not distributed the way everybody assumes.

I get letters. That is not the problem. The problem is that the ones worth answering arrive from a man who is enthusiastic for six weeks and then quietly evaporates the moment the thing becomes ordinary. Four times last year. Every one of them had told me at length that he wanted something long.

Forty two, the commuter belt, thirteen years leading, two years without anybody since the last arrangement ended when he emigrated. What I have concluded is that a great many men want the beginning of this and have never thought about the middle of it. The middle is a Tuesday where nothing dramatic happens, a list of duties that were also on last week's list, and somebody sending a message at the same hour for the four hundredth time. That is the thing itself. The first month is only the door.

So the question I would ask anybody writing to me is not what he wants, but what he thinks the fifth month looks like, and whether he has ever stayed anywhere that long.

I am patient, I am not in a hurry, and I have no interest at all in being anybody's exciting few weeks.