Every couple arrives with the whole thing designed already

In twelve years and four arrangements I have been asked what I would like this to be exactly twice. Everything else arrived fully built: the rules, the frequency, the shape of an evening, what my part in it was. I was invited to accept or decline a finished object and nothing about it was mine.

I do not think that is malice. Couples spend months reaching an agreement between the two of them, and by the time they post, the thinking is done and it feels settled and hard won. Then a stranger appears, and the natural instinct is to hand him the settlement rather than reopen the negotiation for him.

But it produces a strange kind of relationship. I have been in arrangements where I could not have told you what I actually wanted from them, because nobody had asked and it had not occurred to me to ask myself. Forty four, Neukölln, twelve years of this, and only in the last two have I started raising it at all.

So what I would like is a couple willing to leave one or two things genuinely open. Not everything. Most of your rules exist for good reasons and I would not want them dismantled for somebody you have just met. One question, somewhere in the first month, about what I would want if it were up to me.

For the record my answer is dull. Something regular. Knowing the husband. Being told when something is wrong instead of being left to deduce it from the length of the replies.