The community board · United Kingdom
London has the most experienced couples on this board and correspondingly the least patience with a single man who has not bothered to learn what the words mean. People state the arrangement in a sentence and expect a sentence back. The problem everybody has in common is where. Flat shares, lodgers, family, thin conversions and landlords, all of it means that a great many posts here have a line about not being able to host, and a third who can is rarer than any other quality being asked for. Distance is counted in changes on the tube rather than in miles.
Posts come from north of the river, the south east, the east, the west and the commuter belt. People say which side they are on early, because it decides who can realistically meet.
How the board is run A post lands on a city board because the person who wrote it said they were somewhere near London, and that is the whole of what the city tells you. It is a reading board rather than a list of people nearby. Everything on it is anonymous: no names, email addresses, phone numbers, messaging handles, external profiles or photographs are published here, and none are asked for. Nothing is for hire, so anything with a price on it comes off, as does anything describing somebody who did not write it. Posts run for six weeks and then retire, and each carries a flag. Posting and replying for real both happen through the connected platform, where you decide what you share and when.
A couple looking for a third, together and on the same page.
We keep a written list. Not a contract, nothing solemn, just about two sides of what happens, what does not, who is told what, and what either of us does if something goes wrong. It has been revised eleven times in fourteen years and every revision came from something that surprised us.
Looking for a man who reads the list and argues with the parts he dislikes
Read the full post →A single man offering to be the third, and how he presents himself.
Eleven years, five arrangements, two of which ran over three years. I am going to be blunt here because in this city that saves everybody a fortnight, and because the couples I get on with best are the ones who write the same way.
Looking for a couple who have already decided what they want
Read the full post →A photograph in the first week is the one thing I say no to, and it has ended more conversations than anything else about me.
Looking for a couple who can judge a person by what he writes
Read the full post →Everything I have done in four years has happened through a screen. Two long conversations with couples, one of which ran nearly a year and involved more honesty than most of my friendships. Neither of them ever became a meeting, for reasons that were geographical the first time and mine the second.
Looking for a couple willing to be the first people I actually meet
Read the full post →In my second year I wrote to a couple, at length, warmly, and mentioned the husband exactly once, in the last line, to say I hoped he was comfortable with everything. She replied with four sentences. The last one was that he had written most of the post I had just answered.
Looking for a couple willing to hear that I learned this the embarrassing way
Read the full post →It got messy in my fifth year and I took two years off afterwards, which I think was the right call and which I would rather say here than have somebody discover a gap and wonder.
Looking for a couple who talk to each other more than they talk to me
Read the full post →A woman searching with her partner’s knowledge and agreement.
The messages I get are overwhelmingly complimentary and I have started to find them exhausting. Paragraph after paragraph about how lucky my husband is, how rare I am, how a woman like me deserves whatever it is being offered. None of it is unkind. All of it is about a woman who does not exist.
Looking for somebody who will talk to me rather than about me
Read the full post →People wanting conversation, mentoring or local friends rather than a date.
I stopped drinking four years ago and it took about six months to notice that most of my social life in this world had been built on evenings I could no longer face. Nobody excluded me. It is simply that everything happens in a pub, at nine, for four hours, and I would now rather be at home.
Looking for daytime company with people who do not need a bar
Read the full post →The search in London runs on the same four rules it runs on everywhere, and they are mostly about the part before anybody is in a room together.
For a post at full length, the hand-written ones on the main board run longer than a board entry ever does: a couple asking for one careful conversation, a single man in no hurry at all, and a hotwife searching with her husband beside her.
The board runs in 21 cities, and each one reads its own way.
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