Months before anything, which has given me a reputation for being hard work

Slow is a word people have used about me the way you would use it about a bad connection. I take months. Not out of caution about myself, which is not really the issue, but because I do not want to put my hands on a person I do not yet know, and knowing somebody takes exactly as long as it takes.

Thirty nine, downtown, ten years in. This has genuinely cost me. Two women I liked a great deal went elsewhere during the interval and both of them were entirely reasonable about it: they wanted something to be happening, and what was happening was a lot of coffee and long messages and nothing else. I did not blame either of them and I did not speed up.

What I would say in my defence is that all three of my partnerships lasted years, and I think the two facts are related. By the time anything begins I know how a person is when she is tired, what she is like about being disagreed with, and whether the thing she told me about her limits in week two is the same thing she says in week ten.

So if you write to me, expect a correspondence. Expect me to want to meet somewhere ordinary more than once before anything else is on the table. Expect me to be entirely uninterested in going faster because we are getting on well. And expect that once it does start I am not going anywhere for a long time.