My ex is in the same twenty people and always will be

We ended it in the winter and I have seen him every second or third week since, because there is no version of my social life in this city that he is not part of. What matters to me here is about twenty people, he knows all twenty, and four of them were his before they were mine.

We are civil. Genuinely, not performatively. There is simply no clean separation on offer, and anybody who has been here more than a couple of years already knows that without my explaining it.

Thirty two, the south, eight years. What this means for you is specific rather than dramatic. You will meet him. Not immediately, but within a few months, and probably by accident. He will be polite and so will I and it will be mildly strange for roughly ten minutes. What I will not do is ask you to avoid an evening because he will be there, which I did once for somebody and resented for a year.

I switch. What I want is a long partnership with somebody who can handle a small circle without needing it made simpler, because it cannot be made simpler. I am not leaving the city over a breakup and neither is he.

What I am hoping for is somebody who has been through a version of this themselves. Not necessarily here. Anyone from a small scene anywhere will recognise the whole of what I have just described and will not have needed the explanation.