Couples · the west, Amsterdam
Eighteen months and then we go, and you are hearing it now
Pinned as saying_so_now
- Wants
- people who would rather have a good eighteen months than a cautious nothing
- Rope so far
- Eight years together, both of us at both ends of the rope.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
Somebody did this to us in our last city. We were close to a couple for two years, they knew for at least one of those that they were going, and we found out six weeks before the removal van arrived. It was not malicious. It was avoidance, and it soured something we had liked very much, and we decided we were never going to do it to anybody else.
So: eighteen months, and then a posting elsewhere. Thirty five and thirty three, out west, together eight years, and both of us tie and are tied depending on the week.
We know exactly what eighteen months buys. It is enough for a real friendship and not enough for the kind that assumes it has a decade ahead of it. We are not asking anybody to pretend otherwise. We are asking for people who would rather have a good eighteen months than a cautious nothing.
This city seems better set up for that than most places we have lived. Almost everybody we have met has an end date somewhere in their plans and nobody treats it as a tragedy, which took some adjusting to and which we have come to appreciate.
What we would like is two or three couples we actually know by the time we go, and to still be in touch two years afterwards, which is the only real test of whether any of it counted for anything.