You are writing to somebody with a full week and a tired Thursday

The version of a woman who leads that circulates in most men's heads has an enormous amount of free time. She is available, unhurried, and apparently unemployed. I have never met her. Every woman I know who does this is doing it in the gaps of a life that is already full, and a good number of us are doing it while exhausted.

Forty six, the Jersey side, fifteen years leading. I work about sixty hours in a week and on Thursday nights I am no use to anyone. That is not a complaint, it is the shape of the thing, and the arrangements that have worked for me are the ones that made my week lighter rather than heavier.

Which means the useful question for anybody writing is not what he would like from me. It is what he would take off my hands. The last man I had a long arrangement with did all the household admin, the food and the car for four years, and the reason that lasted four years is that it was genuinely load bearing rather than decorative.

So write to me about what you are good at and what you would take on. Then tell me what you want out of it, honestly, because a man who claims to want nothing is lying and I would rather have the truth.

There is no money in this in any direction. What is exchanged is effort and attention, and that is the whole economy of it.