My mother calls twice a week and knows about none of this

I speak to my mother twice a week and she has a completely accurate picture of my job, my flat and the weather here. She has no picture at all of the rest of it. She is four hours away by train, which is close enough that she visits and far enough that I control what she sees when she does.

Thirty three, east side, six years. This is not a tragedy and I am in no distress about it. My family is warm and close and would not understand, and I have decided, as an adult, that not everybody gets everything.

What it means practically is that certain weeks are unavailable, that the flat gets rearranged before a visit, and that I will not be describing you to them for a long time and possibly ever. You would need to be genuinely fine with that, rather than fine with it in month one.

I switch. What I want is a partnership over years with somebody who has a full life of their own and does not need us to be public in order to be real.

What will not work: being told this is a problem to be worked on; being encouraged to tell them, which I have been, warmly, and which helped nobody; somebody whose own family is in this city, which I tried, and the gap in what each of us took for granted was constant.