The arithmetic of a small scene, worked out on paper

Count it out and the number is small enough to be funny. In seven years I have been tied by nine people in this city. The woman I was with for three of them had been tied by six. Four names sit on both lists, none of us finds that remarkable any more, and that is the actual subject of this post.

Thirty one, the city centre, seven years in. Nobody has worked out how to make the arithmetic stop being strange, and I have given up waiting for somebody to. What happens instead is that you meet a person and within a fortnight you have heard three accounts of them from people with their own reasons for the account they give. Some of that is genuinely useful. Some of it has cost me somebody I would have liked.

So what I am after is a partner who can hold two things at once: that I have a history inside the same twenty people they do, and that none of it is a live subject between us. I do not want to be asked to rank anybody. I do not want the hour after a social spent going through who said what to whom.

What I want in the ordinary sense is unremarkable. A single partner, one or two evenings a week, kept up for years. Somebody who will still be at things in five years whether or not we last, because that is what this city is, and pretending otherwise is how people leave it.

Not looking for anyone who wants the full list. Not looking for somebody currently halfway through a falling out with half the room.