Couples · Manhattan, New York
He was my practice partner for two years before he was anything else
Pinned as my_rigger_first
- Wants
- friendship with people who understand how that transition actually goes
- Rope so far
- Two years of practice, then five years of everything else.
- Around
- Manhattan, New York
We were a practice partnership for two years. Same evening every week, entirely non romantic, both of us seeing other people at various points, and everybody involved perfectly clear about what it was. Then it stopped being that, over about three months, in a way neither of us handled particularly well.
The hard part was not the feelings. It was that we had to renegotiate everything from the beginning, because all of our agreements had been built for two people who were not involved. What we could say to each other. What happened when one of us was in a bad mood. Whether the standing evening was now a date, which sounds trivial and turned out to be the whole question.
We are thirty seven and forty, Manhattan, five years past all that and married for two of them.
We are posting because we would like to know people who have made the same crossing. Half the couples we know in this met the same way and nobody talks about the mechanics of it, which we found genuinely lonely at the time.
Not looking for a third and not looking for a practice partner for either of us. Not looking to advise anybody, since we mostly got it wrong and got lucky. And not looking for people who want the story as an anecdote, because it was a difficult year and we tell it briefly.