Photographs are the last step here, and we have lost people over it

Four men have walked away from us at precisely the same moment, which is the moment they asked for a photograph and we said not yet. One of them was angry about it and told us we were wasting his time. He may well have been right, and we are still not sending anything.

Forty five and forty three, the eastern suburbs, six years of this. Her face is attached to her name in a way that cannot be undone, and this end of the city is a village doing an impression of a third of a city. Everybody's cousin knows somebody.

What we will do instead is talk properly, for as long as it takes, and then meet. In daylight, with nothing else possible. You will see both of us at once and you will have learned more in that hour than any picture would ever have told you. Photographs come after that, if at all, and by then they are a formality rather than an audition.

We do know how this reads from the other side. A man can be entirely decent and still find the order of operations insulting, and there is no hard feeling in walking away from it. But the order is not the part of us that moves. Two of the four told us at some length that nobody would ever agree to it. We have found four people who did, and one of them is still in our life two years later.

What does move: where, when, how often, how present he is, whether the three of us become friends or stay something narrower. We hold opinions on all of that fairly loosely. Ask.