I will not be sending a photograph and here is the reasoning

The photograph question arrives, on average, in the third message. Sometimes it is asked politely and sometimes it is framed as fairness, and once or twice a year somebody becomes aggressive about it, which rather makes the argument for me.

I do not send photographs to strangers. Not because I am ashamed of my face at forty five, but because a photograph is the one thing that cannot be taken back, and because a man who needs one before he can be interested has told me what he is sorting for.

There is a second reason and it is the more useful one. Once a face is in the conversation, everything is read through it. I have watched a perfectly good correspondence collapse into flirtation the week after a photograph, and I would rather know what somebody is like when he has nothing to look at.

Forty five, the commuter belt, seventeen years leading, all of it privately and none of it ever photographed by anyone. What I want is a long domestic arrangement with a man who lives near enough to be part of a week. Household service, standing rules, correction that is verbal. There is no money in this in either direction, and there is no session to be had at any price, and I am tired of the number of times a year I have to write that sentence.

We will meet, eventually, in daylight, when I decide. You will see my face then.