We cannot host until November and there is no way around it

Our apartment has three adults in it and only two of them are married to each other. Our roommate is lovely, he pays on time, and his lease runs until November. That single fact has decided more about the last two years than anything either of us actually wanted.

Thirty three and thirty five, Brooklyn, two years in. We have met four people. One of them we saw through most of last autumn and it ended when he took a job upstate, with no drama at all, which we now understand was luck rather than the norm.

What we are asking for is either somebody with his own place and no housemates, which we know is the most requested thing on this board, or somebody willing to spend a summer getting to know us with nothing else on the table until the room is free.

The second version is not a consolation prize. The best stretch we have had began with eleven weeks of messages and two dinners before anything else, and we have wondered ever since whether the eleven weeks were the reason it worked.

He is at home for all of it and he is not sitting in the kitchen being brave. She will say plainly that she is the keener of the two and that he arrived at it later. We are not going to pretend that gap does not exist, because it does, and it is fine, and it is the sort of thing worth knowing before we all like each other too much to raise it.