Twenty six people at Sunday dinner and not one of them can know
Looking for somebody with no connection at all to this side of the city
There were twenty six of us at her mother's in April, including two cousins who work at the same place as me and an uncle who has been in the same road for forty years. Everybody in that room has known everybody else in it since before we were born. That sentence explains this entire post.
Thirty eight and forty, the south of the city, three years of this, and both of us from families who never left.
The practical consequence is that we cannot use any of the ordinary shortcuts. Not a friend who knows. Not a story about a weekend away that anybody could check. The circle is too tight and too fond of each other, and the very thing that makes it a good family to be in makes it impossible to be honest inside.
The cost is not what people assume. It is not fear, exactly. It is that the best thing that has happened to our marriage in ten years is the one thing that will never be said out loud at that table, and there are Sundays where that sits oddly on both of us for an hour and then passes.
So: somebody from another part of the city entirely, with no work or family connection to the south side, who is not going to treat the caution as a game. We are slow, we exchange photographs late, and we will ask you in the first fortnight where you grew up, which is not small talk.
Before the first drink Replying goes through the connected platform, so nothing about you is shared until you decide to share it. Take contact slowly and keep identifying details back until trust is earned. Meet somewhere public the first time, with your own way home from it, and if you are a couple then go together. Tell someone outside it where you are going. Never send money to someone you have not met. And if a post or a reply reads wrong, flag it rather than talking yourself out of the feeling.
Before you answer a post like this
Two people wrote this together, and both of them have to say yes to you. These are the three written for the man on the other end of it.
- What makes a single man read as safe
- Vetting a couple: the screening men skip
- The first meeting: a drink, all three of you