The disclaimer is the title, so here is the actual post

Right, that is the disclaimer handled in the title, so here is what we actually wanted to write about, which is the slow business of discovering that two people who have done this together for nine years have completely different reasons for doing it.

We are thirty six and thirty eight, the south of the city, together twelve years. She worked out somewhere around year six that what she gets from it is almost entirely about being paid attention to. I worked out at roughly the same time that what I get from it is my hands being busy and my head being empty. Neither of us had said either of those things out loud in six years of doing it twice a week.

It did not cause a crisis. It caused a considerably better set of evenings, because once you know what the other person is actually after you stop optimising for the wrong thing entirely. But it took a near stranger asking us a direct question over dinner to get either of us to say it, which is more or less why we are here.

So the ask is friends who ask direct questions. People who have been at this long enough to have found out something surprising about themselves and who will say what it was. Ideally over food, ideally at somebody's house, ideally not in a room with forty other people in it.

We have no arrangement on offer and nothing to negotiate. We are fairly boring, we have been together a long time, and we would like two or three people to be boring with.