My limits changed with my body, and I had to tell somebody who remembered

My back went in the spring of the year before last and it did not entirely come back. There is a list of things I used to do without thinking that I have taken off my own list, permanently, and I made that decision on my own before anybody had to ask me about it. That part was straightforward. The hard part was saying it to a man who had known me for nine years.

Forty four, the east end, sixteen years in. He was not unkind. He was something worse, which was hopeful. He kept referring fondly to how we used to spend an evening and treating the current version as a stage we were passing through, and after a year of that I was dreading evenings I had loved for a decade. So I ended it.

Here is the thing I want understood before anything else. This is not a setback and I am not working my way back towards a previous edition of myself. It is what I do now, it suits me, and I know what my own body is telling me a great deal faster than I did at thirty.

What I want is somebody who asks the practical questions once, at the start, adapts without a discussion about it, and then finds the remaining ground perfectly interesting. In my experience that describes the people who are any good at this. I would like it regular and I would like it to go on for years.