Willingness is generous, and it is not the same as appetite

You can feel it immediately. Somebody who is tying you because you asked, rather than because they want to, holds themselves differently for the whole evening, and no amount of goodwill on either side covers that up. It has happened four times now and I have stopped being polite about noticing.

Thirty seven, the Stockport side, twelve years in. Partners are not the scarce thing here. The scarce thing is a person in whom both directions are actually alive, rather than one direction plus a willingness to accommodate the other around a birthday. Willingness is generous and I have never resented it. It is simply exhausting to receive, because you spend the entire evening quietly monitoring whether the other person is all right.

I do not need an equal split. Mine is nowhere near equal and it drifts about with the season and with whatever my job is doing to me. What I need is for the less frequent direction to be something the other person occasionally wants without being prompted, so that it is not permanently me asking and them agreeing.

I am aware that this narrows the field considerably. Here it narrows further still, because the pool is small and I have already found out about most of it one way or another, usually from somebody who was not trying to tell me.

So this is a wide net cast for a narrow thing. One partner, over years, both ends of it, and neither of us keeping any kind of score.