Nothing physical, ever, and it is not a limit I am negotiating around

I am not interested in sex and never have been, with anybody, at any point in fifty five years. That is not a wound and it is not a limit that patience will erode. It is simply how I am built, and it has made this part of my life very difficult to explain to people who assume that everything here is ultimately about bodies.

Fifty five, Manhattan, twenty years of service arrangements, three of them, the longest eleven years.

What I want is a household to be useful in and a woman with standards to be held to by. The whole of the meaning, for me, is in the obligation. Being expected. Being corrected. Having a fixed place in the running of somebody's life. That is not a reduced version of what other people are doing here, it is the entire thing as far as I am concerned.

The eleven year arrangement was with a woman who understood this in the first conversation and never once tested it. She had a husband, a life and a house, and I ran the parts of it she did not want to think about. It ended when they moved to be near their grandchildren.

What I want now is the same. What I do not want is to be told that I have not met the right person, which I have heard from well meaning people for two decades, or to be somebody's experiment in whether it can be done differently.