The wanted board · United Kingdom
Looking for a Mistress in Manchester
Manchester runs a search on second-hand information. Word about a man travels faster than he does, so the currency worth having is somebody prepared to say they have met you and found you sound. A cold approach still works and simply starts further back, with more to prove and longer to prove it in. The surrounding towns feed the same handful of circles, which is why the same names keep arriving from different directions until a newcomer stops being surprised by it.
Posts come from the city centre, the northern quarter, Salford, Stockport and Didsbury. People lead with their quarter of the city because in a search it decides more than anything else they could tell you about themselves.
Women who lead in Manchester
Lifestyle Mistresses, writing for themselves. They lead in their own relationships and have nothing for hire: no sessions, no tribute, no arrangement with a price attached.
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Turning up properly in this city is mostly about not being a story
Wants: a man who understands that behaving well is a long game here
Thirteen years leading, and a lot of second hand information.
In a bigger city you can behave badly and vanish into it. Here you cannot. Everything anybody does gets discussed within about a fortnight, and men consistently underestimate how completely that shapes their prospects.
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The board assumes a woman who leads is somewhere in her forties
Wants: a man who is not writing to an idea of an older woman
Thirty one years leading, three arrangements, the longest of them seventeen years.
Every advert here from a woman who leads seems to have been written by somebody between thirty five and fifty, and every man writing to me has apparently decided in advance that I must be one too. I am sixty two. I have led for thirty one years, I have no intention of stopping, and the assumption is a small thing that quietly shapes my entire inbox.
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In ten years I have answered three letters, and here is what they had
Wants: a letter about a life rather than a letter arguing a case
Nineteen years leading, two arrangements of eight and four years.
Three letters in ten years. I have read hundreds and answered three, and since the men here keep asking what the difference was, I will tell you. Not one of the three told me what he wanted. All three told me about a week of his own life in enough detail that I could picture the man having it.
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I moved here with twenty years behind me and none of it counted
Wants: a man who is as careful about checking me as I am about him
Twenty two years leading, three arrangements, the longest of them eleven years.
I led for twenty years somewhere else and arrived here two years ago knowing nobody at all, and I have since discovered exactly what the men on this board keep writing about. Not a soul in this city could say a word about me. Twenty years and three long arrangements, and I might as well have started in the spring.
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This advert has sat unfinished in a drafts folder for two years
Wants: a man who is not waiting for somebody to give him permission
Eleven years leading, two arrangements, the longer of them six years.
I have led for eleven years and never once advertised. This has sat unfinished since the winter before last, because every version I wrote sounded either like a job description or like a woman trying to be impressive, and I could not decide which was worse.
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What I want from a man has no sexual element in it at all
Wants: a man who wants to be depended on rather than desired
Twenty three years leading, two arrangements, one of them twelve years.
The arrangement I am describing has nothing sexual in it. Not held back, not waiting to be earned, not a possibility being kept in reserve. I run a household and I want a man in it who is useful and answerable to me, and that is the entire proposition. Men seem to find this much harder to believe when a woman says it than when another man does.
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I will ask about you, and I would rather you knew that in advance
Wants: somebody with nothing to be found, or the honesty to say what is
Seventeen years leading, and one bad experience that taught me this.
If we get past a first exchange, I will ask about you. Not formally and not behind your back in any sneaky sense. I will mention your name to two or three women I trust and see whether anything comes back. In this city, something usually does, one way or the other.
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I answer letters on two Sundays a month and that is not a game
Wants: a man who can be certain of me without being reassured
Twenty years leading, three arrangements, the longest of them ten years.
I read what arrives during the week and I answer on the first and third Sunday of the month. That is not a test of anybody's patience and it is not a technique. It is that I work six days and the only hours I have for correspondence are the ones I have deliberately set aside for it.
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Every woman on this board has twenty years behind her. I have three
Wants: a man who wants somebody who means it rather than somebody seasoned
Three years leading, one arrangement of eight months.
Every other advert here is written by a woman with two decades and a long arrangement behind her. I have three years and one that lasted eight months. I did think about presenting it differently and decided that a woman who lies about that in an advert gets found out inside a fortnight, in a city where everything is checked anyway.
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Here is exactly how I go about a man nobody can vouch for
Wants: a man who finds two months of dull correspondence easy
Nine years leading, two arrangements, one of them with a complete stranger.
Since half this board is men complaining that nobody will take a chance on them, here is precisely how I do it, in order, so anybody writing knows what he is agreeing to. Two months of letters. A phone call. A short meeting somewhere ordinary in the middle of the day. Then another one. Then, if all of that has been dull and consistent, we talk about what an arrangement might actually look like.
Submissives looking in Manchester
People hoping to submit to a woman who leads, saying what they want and what they will not do before anybody has to ask them.
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I wrote back to ask what was wrong with my letter and she told me
Wants: an arrangement written for properly, with the advice taken
Six years, and one extremely useful reply.
After a polite no, I wrote back once and asked, genuinely, what had been wrong with it. Most people would not answer that. She did, in about six lines, and it was the most useful thing that has happened to me in six years of this.
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One person said one sentence about me and it changed everything
Wants: the same arrangement again, now that I know what it takes
Twelve years. One dynamic of seven, ended when she remarried.
In two thousand and thirteen a woman I barely knew told somebody that I was sound and had never given her a moment's trouble. That sentence got me a conversation that became seven years of my life. Nothing I wrote, nothing I said and nothing I did in a room got me anywhere near as far as one person's offhand endorsement.
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Divorced eighteen months, and this is the thing I never said
Wants: somebody patient with a man who is starting very late
None. Twenty five years of knowing and saying nothing.
My marriage ended eighteen months ago for reasons that had nothing to do with this, which is a sentence everybody writes and which happens to be true. We were twenty two years married and I never told her, and I am not entirely sure why not, except that the moment to say it never arrived and after about year four it seemed absurd to bring up.
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My job makes discretion an obligation rather than a preference
Wants: a private arrangement with somebody equally uninterested in being known
Ten years, entirely private, no events, no photographs.
I teach. In a city where information travels the way it does here, that makes discretion a professional requirement rather than a personal preference, and it rules me out of the ordinary route into any of this.
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The problem here is not what I am like, it is that nobody can say so
Wants: one woman willing to take a stranger on his own account
Five years, mostly online, nothing anybody here has witnessed.
Everything I have learned about looking in this city comes down to a single sentence somebody said to me last year: it is not what you are like, it is who will say so. And nobody will say so about me, because everything I have done has been in writing with people who live nowhere near here.
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I read this board for four years before writing a single word on it
Wants: a woman who sets standing tasks and actually checks them
Four years of reading. Nothing at all with another person.
Four years of reading and this is the first thing I have written. Not caution exactly. I kept deciding I was not ready, then reading a bit more, and at some point the reading quietly became the activity rather than the preparation for it. A man on here described the same thing last summer and I recognised myself so completely that I closed the page and did not open it for a month.
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I am married, my wife knows, and she read this before it went up
Wants: a structured arrangement inside limits that are already agreed
Seven years of knowing, three years of negotiating it at home, none of it acted on.
I am married. My wife knows what I am, knows I am posting, and read this before it went up. That arrangement between us took about three years to arrive at and it is not a quiet accommodation or a thing she puts up with. It is a set of rules we agreed, written down, with limits on both sides and a way for either of us to stop it.
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Twenty seven, nights in a warehouse, and my week is a rota not a diary
Wants: somebody who can plan three weeks ahead
Three years, one dynamic of five months.
Nights in a distribution warehouse, six until six, on a rota that changes every three weeks and gets posted on a Thursday. I cannot commit to a particular evening more than three weeks out and that is the single fact that has ended the one dynamic I have had.
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Sixty, widowed, and beginning something I should have begun at thirty
Wants: somebody unhurried who will start a beginner from nothing
None. A very great deal of thinking about it.
My wife died five years ago after a long illness and I nursed her through most of it. I say that at the start because it explains the shape of my life and because I would rather not have to bring it up later.
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Back at university at thirty four, skint, and with a very odd timetable
Wants: somebody who can work around a term timetable and no money
Five years, one dynamic of two, ended when I went back to study.
I left a career I was good at and hated to retrain, which means at thirty four I am living like somebody eleven years younger, in a shared house, with a timetable that makes no sense and an overdraft that makes perfect sense.
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I use a wheelchair, and I would rather ask about the step now
Wants: a plain answer early rather than a kind one in month four
Five years in this, one arrangement of eighteen months.
I use a wheelchair, and in this city that means the question I have to ask early is one nobody enjoys being asked. Is there a step. How many. Is the bathroom upstairs. I put it in the first letter now, because asking in week six, after somebody has become fond of me, is far worse for both of us than asking it before either of us has anything invested.
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No pain at all, and it turns out that rules out most of the board
Wants: somebody whose interest is authority rather than sensation
Six years, two dynamics, both entirely without any of it.
No impact of any kind. Nothing that hurts. Nothing that leaves anything behind. I have said this in six years of conversations and the response about half the time is a kind of puzzled pause, as though I have said I want to go swimming without getting wet.
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Ten years away and the whole thing has changed while I was gone
Wants: a woman who does not mind that half my instincts are stale
Six years, then ten away, then three months back.
I did six years of this in my early thirties and then stopped, partly because of a relationship and partly because I moved to a place where it was not available, and ten years went by faster than I can account for.
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Every advert here assumes the person writing back is a man
Wants: a woman who leads and has simply never had cause to write it differently
Six years, one arrangement of two years, ended by her moving away.
I have read this board for a year and nearly every advert from a woman who leads describes the man she is looking for. I am not one. I am a woman who wants to submit to a woman, and there is nowhere on here where that is assumed, so I have spent a year quietly working out whether I am in the wrong place. I have decided that I am not.
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I keep hearing the same four names from completely different directions
Wants: somebody outside the circle I keep bumping into
Eight years, one dynamic of three, and a very small world.
In eight years around this city I have worked out that it is much smaller than it looks. Four names come up constantly, from people who supposedly do not know each other, in towns twenty miles apart. Twice I have found myself in a conversation with a woman who turned out to know somebody I had written to two years earlier.
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There is an assumption about men like me and I would like to head it off
Wants: an arrangement between two adults with nothing parental in it
Eleven years, three dynamics, none of them like that.
The assumption arrives about the fourth message, usually gently, and it is that what a man in his late thirties really wants when he says structure is somebody to look after him. To decide what he eats, tell him when to sleep and generally take responsibility for a grown adult who would rather not be one.
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Two years of reading, one notebook, and no idea what to do with it
Wants: somebody willing to start a beginner off slowly
Two years of study. Nothing at all in practice.
I have a notebook. It is about half full and it contains two years of reading, thinking and arguing with myself, and it is completely useless because none of it has ever been tested against another person.
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I spent years chasing a word that was never what I meant
Wants: a woman who wants somebody obedient in dull ways
Nine years of the wrong search. Eighteen months of the right one.
For most of nine years I described what I wanted as punishment, and I chased that word into three conversations that all fell apart in roughly the same place. I would get close to somebody who took the word at face value, feel a great wave of reluctance, and disappear. Three times. I assumed I was a time waster and felt appropriately awful about it.
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Nine months in this city and I still do not know a soul in it
Wants: somebody local who is patient with an outsider
Seven years down south. Nine months of nothing here.
I moved up for work in January. In the city I came from I had been at this seven years, I knew people, and a conversation with somebody new started from a position of basic credibility. Here I have discovered that all of that stayed behind, and I might as well have arrived from nothing.
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My mother lives with me and that decides nearly everything here
Wants: an arrangement that lives in tasks, with weekday mornings to meet
Seven years, one arrangement of two, ended before she came to live with me.
My mother has lived with me for three years and needs somebody in the house most of the time. That single fact decides everything about what I can offer, and I have watched two conversations die quietly once it became clear. I do not blame anybody for that at all. It is a real limit and it will not be changing for years.
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I have been to three things and said almost nothing at any of them
Wants: a written start, since rooms are not where I work
Four years, three events attended, no conversations begun.
Three times in four years I have gone to something where people who do this meet each other. Each time I stood near the edge, listened carefully, spoke to nobody beyond ordinary politeness, and went home. I do not regret going. I learned a good deal by listening. But it is now obvious that a room is not where I am going to find anything.
Service and duty in Manchester
People whose interest is usefulness rather than play: standing orders, errands, a household run properly, and being depended on.
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The part I want is being trusted with the house when nobody is in it
Wants: years of dull reliability, and no shortcut to the trusted part
Six years in this, one arrangement of three, ended by her moving.
What I want is not being given jobs while somebody watches. It is being the person who keeps a house running for a week while she is away, so that she comes back to a place that carries on exactly as if she had never left. Post, plants, the boiler man, the cat who will only eat the one thing. Nothing having gone wrong is the whole of what I am offering.
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I want the list on the fridge to be mine to clear
Wants: somebody who inspects the work and sends it back
Three years of standing repairs in one house, ended when she sold it.
Every house has a list. The door that catches, the cracked tile, the shelf that has been leaning since March, the thing everybody steps over and nobody deals with. I want that list to be mine, permanently, and I want somebody who adds to it without first checking whether I have time.
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People keep describing what I want as helping out, and it is not
Wants: instructions that are not softened into requests
Two arrangements, one of five months and one of six years.
Every time I explain this somebody translates it into helping out, as though I am offering to lend a hand when convenient. It is not that, and the difference is the whole of the point. A favour is a thing I choose to do when I feel like doing it. What I want is an order I did not choose, on a day I did not pick, kept on an evening when I would rather be doing almost anything else.
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I served one woman for eleven years and have done nothing since
Wants: the same shape of arrangement rather than the same woman
Eleven years of standing duties in one household. Four years of nothing.
Eleven years of standing duties in one household, and then she died, four years ago, and I have not written so much as a letter since. I am putting it at the top because it is the first thing anybody would need to know, and because I have finally stopped being able to use it as a reason not to try.
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I would like to do somebody's shopping and plan a household's food
Wants: a house that would genuinely depend on me for something dull
Two years running the food for one household, ended by a move.
What I want to be responsible for is the food. Not cooking a nice meal occasionally, the whole boring apparatus: what is in the house, what runs out on a Thursday, what she will not touch, what she has already had twice this week. It is the least interesting offer on this board and it is the one that would take real weight off somebody.
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I am a woman and what I offer is a pair of hands, not a partner
Wants: a woman who inspects the work and has me do it again
Five years of standing duties in one household, and three years without.
I am a woman, I want to serve a woman who leads, and what I am offering is entirely practical. The house, the errands, the standing jobs, done to her standard on a day she picks. I have read a hundred adverts on here and not one was written by somebody like me, so I am assuming I am not the only one and writing accordingly.
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I am awake at four in the morning, so give me the early jobs
Wants: standing orders that suit a man who works nights
Eleven years of night shifts and two years of doing this around them.
I am awake at four most mornings whether anybody needs me or not, and after eleven years of nights that is not going to change. What I would like is for those hours to belong to somebody: the orders placed before the shops open, the car moved before the wardens are about, the run to the airport at five, the bread in before anybody else is up.
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Three long days at work, four days free, and nobody to spend them on
Wants: weekday duties for somebody whose free days are Tuesday to Friday
Three years in this and no arrangement yet.
I work three shifts of twelve hours and then have four days off, every week, permanently. Everybody I know is envious of that until they try to arrange anything with me, at which point it becomes obvious that my free days are Tuesday to Friday and nobody else's are. Those four days are what I am offering.
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I have a van, a free Saturday, and a preference for being told what to do
Wants: a standing day rather than a number to ring in an emergency
Four years of driving and lifting for one household.
I have a van, and in this city that turns out to be worth more than anything else about me. The tip run. The flat pack from the retail park. The airport at four in the morning. The sister who needs a sofa moving across town on a wet Sunday. I have done all of it and I would rather do it for somebody who expects it than for friends who then feel they owe me something.
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Four women have offered to pay me and I said no four times
Wants: a standard rather than a settlement
Twelve years of some version of this, and one arrangement ended over it.
Four times a woman has offered me something for the work, kindly, usually because she had become uncomfortable about how much of it there was. Four times I have said no. Not out of pride, and not because I am well off, but because the moment anything is paid for it becomes a job with a boss, and I have had jobs, and what I am asking for is not one.
This page is stage two of five
Knowing where dominant women are is the stage you are standing on. Nothing above it can be acted on until the three stages after it are, and they run in this order for a reason.
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