She wanted this. I was curious. Those are not the same thing

When she raised it I said yes out of curiosity, which I now think was a slightly cowardly answer dressed up as an open mind. She wanted it. I was interested in what wanting it would look like on her. For roughly a year that gap sat underneath everything and neither of us named it once.

What changed was not dramatic. It was the second man, and the evening she came home and told me about a conversation they had had about her father, of all subjects, and I noticed that I was pleased rather than braced. That was the point at which curiosity became something I would defend.

I am forty six, she is forty three, the eastern suburbs, four years in. I write the posts now because she wrote the first three and got tired of replies arriving as though I were a condition attached to her.

I am telling you the lopsided version because a great many posts here present two people arriving at this simultaneously and hand in hand, and I do not believe most of them. One person usually wants it first. Ours is the ordinary shape. The only question that matters is whether the slower one got there properly in the end, and I did.

Not looking for anybody who wants to congratulate me on being secure. Not looking for a man who reads that honesty as a soft spot worth working on. We want somebody around for a couple of years who speaks to both of us like adults.