I want to date somebody who has never met any of you

I would like to meet somebody who has never met a single person I know, and I am fully aware of how that sounds to people whose entire social life is the same twenty faces turning up at everything.

Thirty seven, the Stockport side, six years in. My last relationship was public in a way I never agreed to. Not through anybody's malice, either. It is simply that when two people here start something, forty others know by the second week, and when it ends they know that too, so both of us then had to conduct a genuinely bad month in front of an audience that was sympathetic, well meaning and completely present.

I do not want to leave. I like these people and several of them have been good to me. I want to keep going to things and I want to date somebody who is not already in the room when I arrive. That means somebody newer, or somebody further out, or somebody who has always kept this side of themselves apart from their friendships, which I am reliably told exists.

What I want from that person is a long partnership, a standing evening, and the slow business of two lives learning to fit. The rope part of it is not unusual at all. The privacy part apparently is.

If you need the room to know about us before it feels real to you, we would frustrate each other inside a month. Better that we both find that out in the first message than the fifth.