I would like to be somebody in this rather than something

Read enough posts here and you start noticing the grammar. Couples want a man who can host, who is discreet, who is free on weeknights, who is clean, who is patient. Every one of those is a specification for an appliance. Not one of them describes a person you would actually want in your life.

I am not offended by it. I understand the position couples are in, and I know this board fills up with men who genuinely are interchangeable. But the effect is that a great many first conversations read like procurement, and I have learned that the ones which begin that way stay that way until they quietly stop.

Thirty five, Neukölln, six years in this. Three arrangements. The good one ran two and a half years. I was at his fortieth, I helped them move a wardrobe up four flights, and I was the person she rang from a train station once. None of that appeared in the original specification.

So what I want is a couple who will ask me something that is not logistics before the second message. What I do for work is not interesting. What I read is. Ask me either. Ask me why I am still at this in my thirties when most of the men I started alongside have drifted out of it.

I will not be a resource that gets slotted into an evening and thanked afterwards. I have done that version twice, it was perfectly pleasant, and it is not what I am here for.