Fifty six, and done being the interesting exception in the room

I am fifty six. The visible half of this in Amsterdam is about half that, I have done the arithmetic, and I am not going to spend a post being wry about my own age in order to put anybody at ease.

Noord, twenty three years of rope, four partnerships, two of which ran past five years. I switch and always have. I am in reasonable shape, I have a settled life, my children are grown and living elsewhere, and my evenings belong to me.

What I have noticed is that a woman of my age posting on a board like this is assumed to want something modest. Companionship, perhaps, or a gentler version of whatever everybody else is doing. That is not what I am after. I want the same thing I wanted at thirty five, arranged rather more sensibly and with far fewer late nights in it.

One person, a standing arrangement, over years. Age genuinely does not matter to me, provided you are not going to be startled by mine. If you would be, that is entirely fine and you should keep scrolling.

I am not here to be anybody's first older partner as an experiment. I do not want compliments about how well I have done. And I would rather not have the conversation about what I must have seen over the years, which is a great deal and almost none of it worth relating.