I read this board for four years before writing a single word on it

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.

Forty, the city centre, and no experience of any of this with another person.

What four years bought me is a decent idea of what I am not. Not after anything performed. Not after pain. Not after somebody to take charge of my entire life, which is the version I assumed at the start because it is the version that gets written about. What is left is a good deal smaller and I am fairly confident about it now.

What I want is a woman who sets standing tasks and checks them. Ordinary domestic things, done to her standard rather than mine, through a normal week, with the correction being that I do the thing again properly.

What I do not want is any credit for the four years. It is not experience. It is four years of not being in the room, and knowing the difference is the only thing the reading actually taught me.