Rope bottoms · the east end, Toronto
Tell me now what your February looks like, because mine is the real test
Pinned as november_to_march
- Wants
- a partner who has already thought about the indoor half of the year
- Rope so far
- Seven years, two long partnerships, both of which died in the cold.
- Around
- the east end, Toronto
Ask me about February. Not about the summer, when everybody is charming and available and there is a whole city to walk around in. Ask me what you do on a Tuesday in February when it is dark at five, the sidewalk is a sheet of ice and neither of us wants to leave a warm apartment. That answer is the whole of it.
Thirty three, the east end, seven years in. Both of my long partnerships were built in June and neither of them survived a winter. That is not a coincidence. From November to March this is an indoor arrangement in somebody's home, twice a week, with the same two people and the same four walls, and it asks something of a relationship that a summer never does.
What I have learned is that the ones who get through it decided in advance whose place, which evenings, and what happens on the nights when somebody cancels because of the weather. The ones who improvise it stop seeing each other in January and call it drifting apart.
So I am posting in July on purpose. I would like to meet somebody now, be ordinary with them through the good months, and go into the cold already knowing how we do this. If you are the sort of person who will want to renegotiate everything the first time it snows, I would rather find that out while it is still warm enough to be gracious about it.