Together six years, two flats, and rope is most of what we get

We do not live together and we are not going to. Two flats, an hour apart on a good day, and one long evening a week that belongs entirely to us. Everyone assumes this is a stage we are passing through. It is not. It is a decision we made in the second year and have been glad of ever since.

What it has done to the rope is strange and we would like to talk to somebody it has happened to as well. Because our time is finite and scheduled, everything we do together is deliberate. Nothing is casual. There is no version of us wandering into an evening because neither of us fancied cooking. That produces an intensity we mostly enjoy and occasionally find exhausting, and it means we have almost no experience of the ordinary domestic version everybody else describes.

We are both in our forties, one of us west and one of us further out, and between us we have about twenty years of this.

What we are after is another couple in the same shape, or honestly anybody who has done a long relationship across two addresses and has thoughts about it. We would like to compare notes on the practical things nobody writes about, like what happens to a practice when neither of you can keep anything at the other's flat.

Not looking for anybody to join us on a Saturday. Not looking to be told we should just move in together. And not looking for a couple who want to make this a regular fixture immediately, since we have precisely one free evening.