For a decade I called it worship and it was never that

I spent about eleven years describing what I wanted as worship, and every time I got close to a woman who took that seriously I found the reality strange and slightly embarrassing, and I would go quiet and blame myself for being a fraud.

I was not a fraud. I had the wrong noun. What I actually want is to be accountable to somebody, in a plain and unromantic way. Not adoration. Not ceremony. Somebody who knows what I said I would do and asks on Sunday whether I did it.

Thirty nine, the Jersey side, and it took a woman being blunt with me two years ago to shake the word loose. She said, roughly, that I kept writing about kneeling and never once about my week, and asked which of the two I actually thought about at work. It was the useful kind of rude.

So: I want standing expectations, a check, and consequences that are not mine to choose. Very little of that needs to happen in the same room, which is fortunate given where I live and what the tunnel is like on a weeknight.

I do not want a title to use, I do not want any of the vocabulary that made me uncomfortable for a decade, and I do not want to be told I am secretly after something more intense. I am not. I am after somebody who will ask on a Sunday.