Riggers · Friedrichshain, Berlin
She was my practice partner for four years and I got it wrong
Pinned as four_years_practice
- Wants
- somebody who takes the boundary between practice and a partner seriously
- Rope so far
- Twelve years, and one very well-run arrangement I misread completely.
- Around
- Friedrichshain, Berlin
We were a practice partnership for four years. Same evening every week, nothing romantic, both of us seeing other people at various points and neither of us confused about it. Or so I thought, until she told me last spring that she was moving in with somebody, and I discovered that I minded far more than a person in my position had any right to.
Nothing improper happened. She did nothing wrong at any stage and neither, I think, did I, beyond failing to notice what four years of undivided weekly attention had quietly done.
Forty three, Friedrichshain, twelve years in. What I took from it is that the line between a practice partner and a partner is real, it is worth defending, and it is not defended by simply agreeing at the start what something is. It has to be looked at again, out loud, about once a year, by both people.
So what I am after now is not another arrangement. It is a relationship, in the ordinary sense, where the rope is part of what we are rather than the reason we meet.
Not looking for a practice partnership. Not looking for somebody who has one running and a spare evening. And not looking to discuss the above in any detail, since I have told it here about as fully as I intend to.