The request for money is the only signal that never lies

Two years ago I spent seven weeks in the best conversation I had ever had on a board like this. Specific, warm, patient, remembered everything. In week eight I was asked to wire a sum to cover a travel emergency, with a full and convincing explanation and an apology attached. I said no. Every message stopped that day.

What I want people to take from this is not that everybody is a fraud. Almost nobody is. It is that seven weeks of perfect behaviour proves nothing, because seven weeks is well within the patience of somebody working at it, and the only thing that ever gave it away was the request.

Forty two, the Bronx, nine years in, two real arrangements of three and four years.

So my position now is absolute and I state it early. Nothing financial, in either direction, for any reason, ever. Not a wire, not a card, not a gift, not expenses, not a figure mentioned in passing as a hypothetical. If money enters the conversation the conversation ends, and I will not apologise to a genuine woman for that, because a genuine woman will not be asking.

What I actually want is completely ordinary. Errands, household work, standing duties, a list, and somebody who checks. Both of my real arrangements were exactly that and in seven years of combined time neither involved a single dollar in either direction.