Here is what makes me open a second letter, since nobody says it

I have been on the receiving end of this for twenty one years and the thing men get wrong has not changed once in that time. It is not tone, it is not length, and it is very rarely rudeness, though rudeness ends it immediately.

It is that the letter is about wanting. Wanting is not information. Every man who writes to me wants this, that is the one thing I can safely assume about all of them, and a paragraph telling me how much only takes up space where something useful could have been.

What makes me open a second letter is two paragraphs about an ordinary week. What you do, what it costs you, what you are good at, what you have been putting off. From that I can tell whether there is a person here who could actually be woven into a life, which is the only question I am asking.

Forty five, Manhattan, twenty one years leading, two long arrangements, both ended when somebody moved and neither ended badly. What I want is a household arrangement with real duties, sitting alongside a demanding job I have no intention of adjusting. Nothing here is professional, nothing is for hire, and there is no money in it in either direction, which I should not have to write and do, because this city trains men to assume otherwise.

The second most common mistake is telling me you are not like the other men. You are writing the same sentence they are.