I ended a good arrangement because I had started wanting more

I finished something good two years ago because I had begun to want a version of it that was never on offer, and I could feel myself starting to angle for it in small ways. Suggesting we meet without him. Going slightly cool when plans changed. Nothing you could point at, all of it heading somewhere.

So I said so, at a lunch, and it was a horrible hour and it was the right thing to do. She was upset. He shook my hand. We have not spoken since and I think that is correct.

Forty seven, the south of the city, fifteen years at this. Four arrangements, the longest four and a half years.

I am putting it in a post because it is the only genuinely useful thing I know about myself here. I am capable of wanting more than the terms allow, it does not announce itself, and it creeps. What I do now is check in with myself every couple of months and say it out loud early if anything is shifting, which is deeply unromantic and has already saved one arrangement that a younger version of me would have quietly wrecked.

What I would like is one couple, settled, seen regularly, over a long stretch. I do not want a partner and I am not looking for a family. I would like something with clear edges and people I am fond of inside them, which is a specific taste, and I have stopped apologising for it.