Mid-Life Ex-Wife

by Stella Grey

  “Exactly. People would think you were secretly a lesbian. If they were secret lesbians too it could become a bit awkward all round.”

  Jack had saved some of the profile pages written by skinny middle-aged Pilates-babes in my neighborhood. The ones he judged successful had a winning combination of softness and steel. They showed a modest sense of achievement and ambition, but not too much. They referenced cultural phenomena that men can relate to (The Fast Show, Blackadder, Shawshank Redemption), and hinted that they had a ditsy side (“I’m a modern girl, but I admit not great with fuseboxes!!”). They reassured men that they liked sex by using the dating site code-word cuddle (“cuddles are my favorite thing, and I will look after you”), and they listed outdoor stuff—a passion for hills, skiing, scuba—under Hobbies and Interests. Being outdoorsy is important to lots of middle-aged men. “I don’t like to sit still too long,” the men on dating sites said, over and over. “Life is for living and I’m looking for a woman to share the adventure with. No couch potatoes please.” Perhaps it’s to do with being middle-aged, this insatiable quest for fitness: a sign that a man is resisting time as much as he can, and that he expects a future partner to have the same King Canute–like determination. It helped explain why some of the dismissal of a well-upholstered woman was so sharp and sneery.

  A message arrived from Morocco.

  “I see you here tonight and I think you are very beautiful and clever,” the message began. The sender was sturdy, bald and had a lovely smile. “I have a bold idea I would like to put you. I think we are ideal for match and I propose that I send you a ticket to coming to Tangier for a weekend to stay in my house and to have food with me.” Another message arrived before I could reply. “I hope you do not think I am not genuine. I am very genuine.” He sent references, scans of his diplomas, photographs of him with his children—they did all look very happy—and of his houses (a city one, and a country one with a pool). Half an hour later another message came, telling me more about his life, how I shouldn’t be put off by his being Muslim, how modern he was in his outlook and how international. He said he was aware that his English wasn’t the best, but that I should consider his many educational attainments. He was actually a great catch.

  I sent a copy of his second email to Jack. “What’s the delay?” was Jack’s only comment.

  “Casual dates not possible when they involve journeys to Tangier,” I told him, stating the obvious.

  “It’s not because he’s five foot six and a bit plain, then.”

  “Height I admit is a factor.”

  Height was a factor, but I wasn’t fixated on handsomeness. I like the idea of plainness, in fact; plainness is comforting when it’s a plain face that you love. And sometimes, people can become handsome in front of your eyes. Fall in love with someone’s mind and find it beautiful and their face might follow. It happens. I had a photograph of a snaggle-toothed ex-boyfriend on the laptop to remind me of this. What you don’t see in the picture is the power of his eyes, his magnetism, nor how interesting he was in conversation: how he could start to talk and hold a whole room spellbound. In person he was irresistible, but none of that was apparent in the photograph.

  Another message arrived from Morocco. I could stay with his sister, my suitor said. She wanted to send me a note assuring me of her brother’s decency. I had to come to a decision and it came down to this: despite all enticements, was I really going to travel to Tangier for this date? No. I replied saying so, with regret, and my correspondent didn’t write again. This annoyed Jack. “You could at least have got a free holiday out of it,” he said. “You reject people way too soon. You might have fallen for him. It would all have been a great adventure. You said you wanted an adventure. You could have had a nice life in Tangier.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Yes, I would,” Jack said. “Like a bloody shot. But nobody ever asks.”

  Simultaneously there was the question of Phil. I’d been trying out my policy of wooing by written word on someone I sort of knew. I hadn’t ever met him, but we were friends of friends, and so the meeting on the internet dating site might have been a bit embarrassing. He didn’t think it was, not at all, he said—or, rather, he wrote, because I never spoke to him or met him. Phil and I illustrated, at an early stage of the quest, the enormous danger of too much emailing. We started out in a pally way, comparing notes on our dating experience. By the second weekend, the messages from him had begun to emit a faint erotic charge. He thought we should meet, he said, but he was so busy. I was enjoying the frisson of email adoration too much to ask why we didn’t fix a date. He resisted making a date. He was up to his eyes in work (he was a lecturer). Instead, he kept writing, and I kept replying. When you live two miles from one another and could put down the laptop and put on your shoes and go and meet for lunch, but instead you confine yourselves to emailing, that’s actually a bit weird. The truth was that we treated each other as substitute people for those we had lost and couldn’t yet find; we had a synthetic kind of intimacy that made us both temporarily less sad. We didn’t admit to that, however. Phil just continued to be busy. And then he said he was muting himself on the dating site, for now, because he really was just too madly busy to have time for it, which was a clean way of ditching me, and I understood, and that was that. This was another lesson learned from internet dating. Lesson Two is that email relationships aren’t relationships. I wish I’d learned that one sooner. Or at all.

  I decided not to send any more messages to academics. I suspected that many of them—despite talking the talk about equality, and how a certain age in women is tremendously sexy—nurtured a secret desire for a winsome thirty-five-year-old and a second batch of children. There had also been, pre-Phil, a doomed dating site encounter with a man who lived so much in his head that he was barely sexual at all. He had that bloodless elongated look of a plant grown in the dark, someone who spent all their time indoors. He was looking for someone to talk to about Wagner, and was straightforward about being low-sexed. The highly educated male on the dating circuit is often a creature in need of elaborate mating rituals. Sometimes they are too diffident to suggest that an actual meeting takes place. Sometimes they give the impression of being too sensitive to have an erection. Perhaps, for some, continuous verbal sparring with someone of like mind is enough to achieve orgasm, though it might only express itself as a kind of juddering in the temporal lobes. I felt I needed someone a little more vital, someone who lived in their body more. Not Mellors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame, maybe—but someone with appetite.

  Sex and Sensibility

  SUMMER, YEAR ONE

  One evening, walking the halls of a dating site, looking in doorways and finding other doors firmly closed to me, I began talking to a man called Oliver, who—if that really was him in the photograph—was six foot three and darkly handsome. He was also twenty years younger than me. Prior to his first message he’d looked at my profile almost every day for weeks, unaware or else unbothered that the site notches up each viewing. It got to the point that he’d visited twenty-three times. What’s he thinking? I asked myself each time he came back and looked at my page; what’s he deciding? Is it the picture? Is it my age? The alpha-control-freak intellectual-snob thing? Eventually there was a message.

  It said: “Hello, how are you?”

  This is lazy, as opening gambits go. It gives away nothing while asking for a lot, and is fundamentally unanswerable. What was he asking for—the news that my glands were up, that my bank balance was precarious, that I couldn’t find a novel I wanted to read next, and that I’d put on a swimsuit earlier that day and said, Oh God in heaven, no? I think what he really hoped for was: “Feeling horny, shall we meet at a Holiday Inn and screw?” The best reply to the “How are you?” query is equally bland and meaningless: “Fine thanks. You?” That way, the ball goes back into his court. He was the one who initiated contact, after all. A dating site shouldn’t b
e a machine that men feed a pound coin into and that delivers entertainment down a chute.

  What I did instead, because I was bored, was tell him exactly how I was. It took five paragraphs and a lot of rewrites. At the end of my answer I asked how he was. He didn’t reply. I couldn’t believe it. I’d done it again.

  So the next evening when he asked how I was tonight, instead of saying, “Fine thanks, you?” I sent him an even longer answer, with reference to meals eaten, energy levels, lengths swum, the working day and the outrageous cost of a Fry’s chocolate cream at the corner shop: 80p! That’s 16 shillings! (He took my quaint shilling talk in his stride, perhaps aware that it was intended to emphasize our age difference.) I asked him how his day had gone. There was no response.

  The next day there he was again. “How are you today?”

  “I could tell you,” I wrote, “but what’s the point? You never talk back.”

  “You’re very attractive, do you want to meet for dinner?” he answered. “Tonight?”

  I said I couldn’t, sorry. And besides I’d already eaten. (I hadn’t. It was a lie.)

  “So what are you doing now?” he typed.

  “Sprawled on the sofa with a book,” I wrote, unguardedly.

  “Mmm. I like the idea of you sprawled.”

  “Ha,” I typed back, completely unnerved. “But you are way too young for me.”

  “Girls bore me,” he wrote. “I’m more interested in women, real women like you. Looking forward to our first date. Saturday?”

  “I can’t this week,” I replied. I was sure that Oliver would take one look at me and run, which was a pity, because in many respects he was absolutely what the doctor would have ordered, if the doctor was a middle-aged woman who hadn’t had sex for quite a while. “Tell me more about yourself,” I said. It wasn’t even that I was interested in him. But I was determined to win this one. Online dating can be gladiatorial and I was determined not to be one of the Christians, munched up by a suave and smarmy lion.

  “You can find out all about me over dinner,” he wrote.

  The next day, there he was again. “How are you tonight?” he asked.

  Fine, thanks, I said. I left it at that.

  He responded in real time, in twenty seconds—we were now having a real-time conversation on the screen. He wrote: “When we go to dinner, will you be wearing a skirt?”

  “Probably, or a dress. Why?”

  “Will it be short?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Will you wear stockings, so I can put my hand under your skirt as we’re having a drink?”

  “That’s forward.”

  “I bet you have gorgeous long legs. Are they long?”

  “Not really,” I lied. I am way out of my depth here, I thought.

  “And will you wear heels?”

  “Probably not. I might wear heeled boots.”

  “Wear heels, a short skirt and stockings, just for me.”

  “Oliver, I’m not really a heels and stockings kind of a woman,” I wrote. “To be honest, I get kind of sick of all these clichés of femininity.” I knew this reply broke one of the iron laws of online dating—pomposity!—but I was sick of them.

  “I have total respect for that,” Oliver wrote. “It’s a good point.”

  A thirty-second silence fell, while I contemplated his response, and he contemplated it also. I broke the silence. “Why aren’t you taking a woman your own age out to dinner?”

  “Women my own age want marriage and babies. I don’t want marriage and babies.”

  “Ah.”

  “Meet me.”

  “Not now. But some time. Maybe.”

  “You like to play hard to get, then.”

  “Hard to get? We’ve barely said hello. Tell me more about yourself. Something. Anything.”

  He didn’t reply, but for ages afterwards there were near-daily messages wanting to know how I was. I stopped responding, other than to ask him, twice, why he kept doing it: what was in it for him? He didn’t say. It was mystifying.

  I had a chat with two friends who were also “listed.” (This was the shorthand we’d developed for discussing online dating. “Is X listed?” “Yes, she’s been listed for over a year.”) One of them couldn’t help but be amused about my discussing “the search for the One.” “You don’t really think men are looking for the One, do you?” she asked me. (She had become cynical by then.) “For most of them, sex with a lot of people and avoiding being in a couple is precisely the point of the exercise.” According to her, men were treating these sites like a giant sweet shop, and were picking bagfuls of sweets. Some of them were tasting in order to whittle the choice to one, she conceded, but others had begun a bachelor life of new sweets every weekend, and had no intention of stopping for anyone. “Men see the sea of faces on dating sites and think, All these women are basically saying, ‘You can have sex with me if you want,’ but I don’t think that’s what most of us are saying.” The woman in the group who’d been dating the longest said she understood the male perspective. It wasn’t just men who were behaving that way. She was, too. “I find I’m the same these days. I find someone nice but then I get drawn back in. There is always the possibility of someone better. It’s difficult to draw a line.”

  Sometimes a Sunday was spent at home, trawling the listings in my pajamas, sitting cross-legged and eating leftover Chinese takeaway (and every other food not nailed down in the fridge). It’s easy to become obsessive about the online dating search. It’s like the kind of feverishness that can grab you when you’ve sold one house and can’t find another. The process becomes compulsive, until eventually, inevitably, you begin to reconsider places that you put in the No pile. Hours could pass unnoticed in the time spent “just popping in” to a dating site. I found myself scrolling through the hundreds of faces on screen, all of them saying (at least theoretically), “Talk to me; I’m here, I’m free, I’m looking for someone to love, and it might be you.”

  But maybe not this one: “I like my independence but I’d also like a certain kind of female company on my days off.” Or this one: “Living the dream working in a call center, and need something to come home to other than existential despair.” Though he received a comradely pat on the shoulder.

  In online dating there is such a thing as a kind lie. It’s sent in response to an unwanted approach, as a sort of kindly meant shorthand. It’s a brush-off that’s politely worded, designed to avoid hurt. It avoids listing the nine reasons why you don’t want to have coffee. Usually I’d say something like, “I’ve just begun seeing someone and am only here checking my messages, but thank you, I was flattered, and good luck.” In online dating, the kind lie is vital. I wish the men who use the sites understood this. I’d much rather be sent the kind lie than be ignored. Being ignored doesn’t say, “Sorry, not interested,” so much as, “You are beneath my notice.” It says, “You’re not worth fifteen seconds of my life.” It might also say, “At your age and non-thin, you need to lower your sights somewhat; please take my non-reply as a hint.” These are not good thoughts to be sent swirling into the 3 a.m. insomnia of a person with flat-lining morale.

  Ignoring is just bloody rude. None of the men who didn’t reply would blank me if I said hello to them at a party: why should the internet be different? At a party you’d be polite in a style that indicated, in a grown-up way, that you weren’t romantically interested. You’d say you must mingle, and you’d move on. You’d give the impression of being already attached. These are kind lies we all use in life. But perhaps when they’re online, some people behave in a way that they would all the time if they could get away with it. Perhaps there’s a gloriously liberating quality to being able to behave badly, particularly after a long marriage, and decades of behaving well.

  I began using the kind lie quite a bit. It was a way of dealing with being pestered—not for dates, you understand, but for sex. The lie about having just got involved with someone is effective with the sex-pests. It reads, to them, as,
“You were just too late at the sweet shop, sunshine; sorry.” The sex-pests are generally attuned to the Man Code (one item of which reads: “You don’t shag another man’s woman in an alley”).

  I also used the kind lie on the man who had a very particular vision of what his woman would look like (despite closely resembling a fruitbat himself). He went into detail so specific that it even considered her fingernails (short, but shaped, and painted with clear gloss). He wanted to know if I’d consider dyeing my hair red, and whether I was even-tempered. “The woman I’m looking for will make me smile continually when we’re together and will ensure that I miss her when we’re apart,” he wrote. I told him I was in the early stages of talking to someone, and wished him luck. Ordinarily I wished people luck, though I didn’t to the bloke who wrote to assure me that being the bit on the side to a sexless union (his) would prove glorious and liberating. I got his picture back up and stabbed him in the heart with a chopstick.

  I’ve had the kind lie used on me, by men who considered themselves out of my league. In one case I knew it was “the kind lie” because I saw the person in question’s online light lit night and day for the next six weeks, as he scoured the listings restlessly for someone better. On one occasion I was caught out doing that myself, by a man I’d delivered the lie to. He called me on it. He’d seen my green light lit for days on end, after I’d said I was only there checking my messages. I felt bad about this. I had to apologize. I had to admit that it was just a useful shorthand. “It’s because you’re almost seventy,” I confessed. “And you live on the Isle of Wight. It wouldn’t be worth making huge journeys to see one another, because it wouldn’t work: as you say yourself, you don’t read, and you don’t like music and you’re allergic to dogs, and that makes us incompatible. You see, it isn’t better if I give you the real reasons, is it? I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. There’s someone for everyone. Perhaps start with people who live on the same island as you.”