When I was seeing a therapist a couple of years back, she asked me to write a list of what I would like in a potential partner and to bring it to our next session. I was round my friend Ella’s house for dinner, and she offered to help me with it. Even coming up with a list of things that were important for me felt hard. Some of it was the defeated part of me that assumed I would never get what I wanted – being madly desired was something I felt was important, but I also knew it had to be less important than it had been in the past – but some of it was simply not knowing. Ella wrote things down as I thought out loud. I remember saying ‘someone who goes outdoors’ and ‘someone who is enthusiastic about something’ – my bar set very low. But a lot of the other things I said were borrowed ideas from positive representations of romance, or just too generic. It made me think of a list Roddy once wrote when I asked him why he liked me and how it didn’t have a specificity that made me feel seen, it was all ‘blonde, curvy, likes music, Geordie’ etc.