I stopped completely for half a year and came back much smaller

In November I stopped going to everything and did none of this for six months. No messages, no evenings, nothing at all. What burned me out was never the rope. It was the volume of social administration that had attached itself to the rope, and how much of my own week had quietly become other people's business.

Forty two, the city centre, fifteen years in. By the end I was at four things a month, I knew everybody, I was somebody people came to when there was a disagreement, and I could not remember the last evening I had spent with one person and no context sitting around it.

The six months were dull and enormously good for me. I read, I got fitter, I saw the two friends I actually like rather than the thirty I merely know. What came back at the end of it was a clear picture of the part I want, and the part I want is small.

So I am back, deliberately, on a much narrower footing. One partner. One evening a week, possibly two. Nothing public, not out of secrecy but because the public part is exactly what I burned out on. If anybody asks whether I am seeing somebody I will say yes and then nothing further.

Not looking for a partner whose social life needs me in it. Not looking to be at things. And not looking to be told that I have gone strange, which two people have managed already and which was not helpful either time.