Rope bottoms · Salford, Manchester
A body to work on is not the same as a person to know
Pinned as not_anybodys_practice
- Wants
- a relationship, and not a standing slot in somebody's training week
- Rope so far
- Eight years, four arrangements, one relationship out of all of them.
- Around
- Salford, Manchester
The message I get, in various dressings, is that somebody needs a body to work on and I look patient. It arrives roughly twice a month, it is always framed as an opportunity, and I have started replying with a single line saying no, which is rude and has improved my year enormously.
Thirty two, Salford, eight years in. I have nothing against practice as an arrangement between two people who both want exactly that. What I object to is being approached for it by somebody who then mentions a relationship as a thing that might grow out of it later, because it does not grow out of it, and I have four years of evidence sitting in my own history.
The tell is early and it is completely reliable. If the first three messages are about what you would like to work on, and not one of them is a question about me, then I know what this is. It is not personal. I can spot it in about ninety seconds now and I have stopped feeling guilty about that.
What I want is a partner. Somebody whose week I know about. Somebody for whom the evening would still be worth having on a night when we did no rope at all, which happens in every real partnership I have ever watched and never once in an arrangement.
I am not difficult to please, either. One careful person over several years, and they do not have to be any good yet, because neither was I.