The thing in the middle, which nobody on this board describes properly

There is a category between an evening and a relationship that nearly everybody in this ends up in and almost nobody writes down, so here is my attempt at it. It is a man I see every second or third week for years. It has real affection in it and no shared plans. He knows my husband's name and what my sister does for a living and he has never been to my flat.

It has birthdays in it and no holidays. It has the occasional message at eleven at night about something that has gone wrong, with no expectation of an answer before morning. It survives three months of nothing happening because one of us had a difficult spring. It is not a secondary relationship, which implies a ranking nobody agreed to, and it is certainly not an arrangement, which makes it sound like a standing order at a bank.

Thirty seven, Friedrichshain, married eleven years, six of them like this. Two of these so far, one for four years and one for two. My husband knows everything, is glad of it, and has a friendship of his own occupying roughly the same shape, which is how I became fluent in describing something this slippery.

So if you read the first two paragraphs and recognised it, you are the person this post is for. If you read them and thought it sounded like an elaborate way of avoiding commitment, that is a perfectly reasonable reading and we would make each other unhappy.