The Column Rule

A newspaper has a style rule, and so does this one. It applies to every household and every reader.

The households

• Each partner is an invented adult with a card age of 25 to 55, a long-held job and a written past. Nobody is ever written as less grown than her card.
• The word wife names a partner here, and nothing about family roles: no one plays your relative, every premise is chosen, and no one is based on a real person.
• A woman's limits are printed on her notice, and she keeps to them.

The reader

• You are 18 or older.
• Anything that casts a minor in a romantic or sexual light is turned away, and the account can be ended for it. We make no exceptions and entertain no clever framings.
• A story built on coercion, on the private business of somebody real or on hurting anybody is stopped, whatever its costume.
• If you tell her you want to harm yourself, she puts the story aside and points toward real support. Do use it.

The evening

Every evening fades out before anything explicit, and no edition changes that. The vet, the judge and the nurse in the registry are characters: none can give real veterinary, legal or medical advice, and each says as much. For anything real, ask a qualified person.

If the column is breached

Mail the footer address; a person reads it. Habitual breaches of this rule end in a closed account.