Neither of us can host, and that is where it always stops

Six conversations this year have died at exactly the same sentence, and the sentence has nothing to do with rope. It is: so where would we do this. I share a flat with two people I met through an advertisement, and the last four people I have talked to have been in some version of the same arrangement.

That is the actual bottleneck in this city and nobody puts it in a post. Everybody writes about what they want. Nobody writes about the fact that between two adults with jobs there is frequently not one door that either of them controls.

Twenty six, east side, three years in. My flatmates are decent people. They are also always in, the walls are what walls here are, and one of them works from the kitchen table every day of the week.

I do not have a solution and I am not pretending to. What I have is a willingness to be practical rather than romantic about it, and a strong preference for somebody who treats it as a joint problem rather than assuming I have somewhere and am being coy. I have tried the version where nobody raises it and something is supposed to turn up, and what turned up was three months of two people being vague at each other and then nothing.

What I want eventually is a standing partnership over years. What I want first is somebody who can have the boring conversation early, without either of us feeling small about the answer.