Riggers · the west end, Toronto
The offer is two evenings a week, every week, for years
Pinned as offering_two_evenings
- Wants
- somebody who wants a standing commitment rather than the idea of one
- Rope so far
- Fourteen years, three partnerships, the longest of them six years.
- Around
- the west end, Toronto
Here is the offer in hours rather than adjectives. Two evenings a week, most weeks, from about seven until whenever we stop talking. Call it six hours, plus whatever travel one of us does, plus the messages in between. Over a year that comes to something like three hundred hours, which is more time than most people spend with anybody who is not family.
Forty one, the west end, fourteen years in. I put it that way because people agree to a standing commitment in the abstract and then meet the reality of one around week nine, when a friend has a birthday on a Wednesday and it turns out Wednesday is ours. That is the moment the whole thing gets decided, in my experience, and it is never a dramatic conversation.
I am not rigid about it and I do not need anybody else to be. Things move. But the default has to be that it happens, because the alternative is a thing that occurs when both of us are free, and I have done that version and it evaporates by March.
What I want out of it is a partnership. Not a rotation, not variety, not a schedule with slots in it. One person who becomes the fixed point of my week, and whose week I am the fixed point of. If two evenings sounds like a lot now, I promise it sounds like a great deal more in November.