Fourteen years, and a dull conversation we have four times a year

Three or four times a year we have the same ten minute conversation. It is administrative and faintly boring and it runs: is this still fine, has anything changed, is there anything you would rather I did not do. Then we talk about something else entirely. Fourteen years, and that dull recurring ten minutes is the whole mechanism by which this works.

Forty one, outside the ring. He does not tie, has no interest in it, tried nothing and wanted to try nothing, and has never at any stage been uncomfortable. I am aware of how improbable that reads on a board where most people's arrangements have some tension in them.

I switch. What I am looking for is a rope partnership alongside a marriage that is not in any difficulty, with one person, over years. He knows about this post. He read it. His only comment concerned the word administrative.

The thing I have learned to check for is whether somebody needs my marriage to be secretly unhappy. It comes up more than you would think, usually dressed as concern, and it is the one thing that has ended two otherwise promising conversations. It is not really concern. It is a wish for the arrangement to be more explicable than it is.

What would work best is somebody with a full life of their own. Somebody for whom two evenings a week is plenty and who has no interest in being anybody's centre.