Fifty one, two years in, and everybody assumes I came with somebody

At every single thing I have been to, somebody has asked me who I came with. Never unkindly. It is simply that a woman of fifty one standing near the edge of a room reads to this scene as somebody's plus one, and I have been entirely on my own the whole time.

Fifty one, the Stockport side. Twenty three years married, finished four years ago, and none of that had the slightest connection to this. Then two years of slowly working out that a thing I had thought about since my twenties was still available to me.

So my experience is two years. It is real and it is thin. I know what I like. What I do not know is very much about how people in this city arrange their lives around it, and I have found asking difficult, because a question at fifty one gets you either a very long answer or a slightly startled one.

What I want is a partnership. A person, an evening, some years. I am not trying to make up for lost time and I am mildly allergic to being told I am brave. I am not brave. I am late, which is a different thing, and mostly I feel quite ordinary about it.

Not looking for anybody who finds my age a novelty and says so in the first message. Not looking to be somebody's project. And not looking for a partnership that would need me at everything, because I already have a life and I like it.