We closed the marriage again and miss the people, not the arrangement
Looking for friends from this world, with the arrangement part firmly over
We closed it two years ago for no reason more interesting than that we had stopped wanting it, which is an unglamorous ending and a real one. Nobody was hurt, there was no incident, and we still cannot entirely explain it to people who ask.
What we had not expected is that closing the marriage also closed a social circle. Eight years of people, most of them met through all of this, and within about six months the invitations thinned out and then stopped. Nobody dropped us. It is that a couple who no longer do it are slightly awkward company at a table where everybody else does, and we understand it perfectly, and we miss them.
Fifty two and fifty four, the Stockport side, thirty years married, eight of those open and two of them shut again.
So this is a post asking for friends and for nothing else. Dinner. A walk. Somebody to be honest with about a part of our lives that took up most of our forties. We are not reopening anything, we will not be persuaded, and if we ever did change our minds it would not begin with a lunch arranged under false pretences.
We are good company, we have decades of stories, and we are entirely unshockable, which people tell us is restful. If you are two years in and full of questions, we would enjoy that enormously.
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
Nobody here is asking for a date, so none of this is about arranging one.
- What it is actually like, against what you imagined
- How to tell your partner you want this
- When there is no scene where you live