by Stella Grey
I spoke to my friend Jack about my invisibility. I told him about the fifty-year-old men on the high street, ogling the twenty-five-year-olds. “Men online are the same,” I told him. “They say they’re after true love but really what they’re after are the twenty-five-year-olds.”
“Maybe they think they can have both,” Jack said.
“You’re not like that, though, are you? Given a choice, you’d pick the older more interesting woman, the passionate, well-read, intrepid, low-maintenance woman.”
“Nice of you to think so,” Jack said. “But I’d go for the firm arse and tits, always, without question.” I expressed some mild disgust. “You just have to face facts,” he said. “Men respond visually, and we can’t help it.” (He kept telling me this.) “Well, we could probably help it, but we don’t want to. Online dating’s giving these idiots the impression that they can snag a honey. Most of them have no chance, of course. Don’t you look at the twenty-five-year-old men in the street?”
“I don’t. Honestly. They have mothers my age, so it’d be like randily pursuing the children of your friends. There’s something inherently unsexy about that whole setup.”
“Sexy as hell.”
“It’s the fifty-five-year-old, slightly rumpled silver foxes that I stare at, the tall well-traveled, well-used ones. But they don’t see me.”
“Perhaps you should wear brighter colors.”
I looked down at myself. “I like navy blue. What’s wrong with navy blue?”
“These are just facts. Men like youth. They like long hair. They like color. They like slender, as well. Sorry. You’re going to have to lose weight and grow your hair and wear red if you want the silver foxes to see you.”
It was, disappointingly, just what Gerald had said. The question is, as I asked myself in the bathroom mirror late that night: should I be prepared to change?
In the morning I had the answer. Physically change in order to please others? Absolutely not. Gerald’s worldview was still pissing me off. I decided that I’d go the other way entirely, and be more frank in the profile pictures. I took new photographs, and posted them: a makeup-free close-up and two at full length, one unedited in jeans, and another in a knee-length skirt, sans opaques. Honest photographs. After I’d done this my weight began to attract attention. Not all of it was negative. I felt unusually fondly about the man who wanted to blow raspberries on my thighs. He was a superhero compared to some other respondents. One man who’d seen both the before and after pictures felt the need to inform me why he wasn’t going to be asking me out. He was a doctor, you see, and when he saw obesity he saw death. The very old people on the streets are never the obese ones, he chided, and didn’t I want to live a long time, without being a burden to my family and the NHS? It seemed a lot to put on the shoulders of a person with a fondness for marmalade. Plus, hold on a minute, what? Obese? I was happy to admit to roundedness. I carry a little cake at the hips and belly . . . okay, about twenty pounds of cake. But, you know what—I said to the laptop screen, in a defiant voice—actually, matey, I look all right. I’m heavier than I was at thirty-five, granted, but I’m still in proportion, and I can still run up four flights of stairs without cardiac incident. My heart pounded in my ears. I pointed out, furthermore, that I hadn’t asked for a date; I’d hoped that the process was as much about making new friends and widening your circle as about being invited out to dinner. (It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.) He said that my thinner pictures were unnecessarily coy and should be abandoned altogether. I think what he was really saying was that they’re a form of false advertising.
“There are plenty of nice men who are into bigger girls,” he wrote. “And so it’s counter-productive to fail to admit to being one of them, because it won’t work out and you’re wasting your time. And ours, to be frank.” I looked at the honest photographs. Bigger girls? I’m a “bigger girl”? Later he wrote again. He was sorry he’d been so tactless; he was overloaded with work. “I’m sure you’re a lovely woman,” he wrote. “You have knockout dark eyes and sensual lips, and a very nicely turned ankle. It’s just that every day I see the cost to health of obesity.” I looked at his profile pictures more closely; the one showing him on a boat with his pals revealed a hint of a paunch and the beginnings of a double chin. The bloody nerve!
“Midlife online dating is a buyer’s market,” I said to a girlfriend over lunch, “and the truth is that men are the buyers. Women are the merchandise offered for perusal.”
“It’s only one guy, one joyless berk,” she consoled. “Darling, you’re gorgeous. Barely even fat at all.”
But the truth was there had been others. Two others. A bloke had already messaged saying he could see that if we got together there would have to be fruit for pudding. “A woman needs to keep paying attention to her physical beauty,” he replied, when I told him he was rude. Then there was the diet specialist who said I should pick him as a boyfriend because he could help me lose weight. Romance is perhaps a dangerous thing, but this was a tad too far in the other direction. When I turned him down, he wrote: “Can I politely suggest that if you don’t want comments about your size, you remove references to it from your profile?” (Footnote: I’d never go out with anyone who used the phrase “Can I politely suggest.” They’re like the people who start sentences with “No offense, but.” It’s never a polite suggestion, and offense is always involved. It’s passive aggression.) But he was right, the doctor, that there’s a market for the larger lady, distasteful though that phrase is. I know someone, an ample, lusciously curvy woman, big all over, and she’s highly in demand . . . though only with men she doesn’t want to meet.
As is the way of things, a bad week made me vulnerable to a whole raft of bad ideas: there was a midnight ice-cream binge with Cameron Diaz, and an only just averted purchase of a run-down hovel in southern Bulgaria, before hitting the rapids, the white water and messaging Peter asking why he didn’t want to see me, if I was wonderful, and why he so very obviously regretted meeting up. He didn’t reply, which was probably just as well. I was strong and deleted his number from my phone. Late-night texting is too easy. Unlike email’s big empty sheet of paper, it’s a medium of a single thought or single question, and not enough time passes between being an idiot and pressing Send.
A friend, unaware that I was attempting dating, suggested I start dating. “I am dating,” I told her. “It’s just the modern kind, when you don’t leave the house. But I’m going to meet the next man who asks me out, even if he lives in Caithness and is pictured with a great big axe.”
Later that afternoon, I got a two-line email from a man who lived twenty miles away, wanting to meet for dinner. His wasn’t a new face or name to me. Jonathan was one of the most persistent of the lurkers. He’d already visited my profile page two dozen times, in the manner of someone trying to talk themselves into something, and every time he had a look the site notched up his visit. He’d never said anything when he cast his eye, so it was surprising to get an invitation to dine with him, out of the blue. That’s the kind of word Jonathan uses. He dines, preferably with a lady (which makes him sound like a dinosaur, though in fact he was four years younger than me). His own profile gave nothing away: he’d left all the fields blank that were supposed to be filled in with interests, biography, MARITAL STATUS. There were no words but there were lots of pictures: he was in sunglasses in every photograph and wasn’t smiling in any of them, but I could forgive him that. Loneliness is a solemn business.
Jonathan was in a big hurry, and didn’t want to talk before the date. He was a man for one-line messages, organizing messages. Did I want to have dinner, or not? I said I wasn’t free until next week. He said we could pencil in a date, although he might be taken by then and off the market. We established that he was single, and I asked if we could email a bit, to break the ice. He told me there wasn’t any point. “It’ll either be fireworks or it won’t,” he said. “I’ll know in the first five minutes, and so will you.” I began to be nervo
us. I asked if we could email anyway. He said he didn’t have time.
“What do you mean, you don’t have time?” I asked him. “Don’t you want to know anything about me? I could have been married nine times; I might have just got out of prison.”
“That’ll give us something to talk about,” he replied. “Give me your number. I’m going to ring you, right now.” It turned out he was an American, one who adopted an immediate authority on the phone. Perhaps he thought it was sexy to organize a woman and brook no dissent; perhaps he’d been infected by one of those masculinist directives about being manly and in charge: “Don’t ask her, just tell her,” blah blah. I wasn’t attracted to the controlling manner, but it was pathetic that I hadn’t had a date since Peter, and this was just going to be dinner, after all. “So,” he said. “We will have lunch.”
“I thought it was dinner,” I said.
“Lunch,” he decreed. “And if we hit it off and the sex is fantastic and we have to be together, I’d like you to move in as soon as possible. It’s a drag living alone. I’m going to walk round my house and tell you all about it.” He began to walk from room to room, describing each of them in detail to me, the furnishings, the views, the antiques, the open fires, which I couldn’t help finding rather endearing. He was trying to impress me. He was wooing. When the tour was completed I began to tell him something about myself. He interrupted me. “My dear, you don’t need to impress me with your many fine attributes. All I need to know is, do you want a man in your life? Do you want commitment?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Theoretically.”
“Theoretically?” he repeated. “Theoretically is the enemy of the orgasm.”
“I think we should have this lunch and see what happens,” I said. “Let’s have the lunch.”
“Okay then,” he said, gratified and approving. “Good girl. That’s the spirit.”
We were supposed to have lunch on Saturday, but he rang to postpone until Sunday, and when I asked if it was because he’d received a better offer, he laughed and said I was perspicacious. “Perhaps we’d better wait till Sunday morning to see if you’re still single,” I said, remaining calm. It was apparent that I wasn’t the only woman he’d given the full guided tour of his antiques to, and it was further apparent that he was ranking us in order of preference, and I wasn’t his first choice. Boldly, I put this to him (this whole process has made me a shooter from the hip, because who has time for games and their players?) and he said he’d been joking, and actually it was his mother-in-law’s birthday dinner on Saturday, a fact that he’d forgotten. Mother-in-law? It transpired he was still married. I told him I didn’t have lunch with married men. He said his wife didn’t live with him anymore, and were we having lunch, or not? Yes, I said. I think we should have lunch. Why not?
“You sound a bit down in the dumps,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m just tired,” I told him, aware I was using the euphemism I so object to whenever it’s used on me. “Combination of hormones, not working hard enough and a sore tum. It will pass.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I prefer you when you are witty and sparkly and sarcastic.” I’m sarcastic? Then he said, “What are you wearing? And what kind of underwear are you wearing?”
I told him I didn’t discuss my Marks and Spencer scanties with married men who canceled lunch dates. He asked what I liked in bed. Cocoa, a Kindle and blissful sleep, I said. He replied that I shouldn’t be so coy, that it was thrilling to dare to be frank with a stranger. I said more details of my preferences in all things weren’t available until at least the second date. I was sweating by now, so terrible am I at flirting with total strangers on the phone. (NB, I said to myself: no more cocoa talk. Ever. Kindles are no doubt also the enemy of the orgasm.)
“Question for you,” he said. “Do you really want a man? Do you really want a man in your life? Because I want a woman. I want to cuddle up and spoon a lovely woman in my bed. Is that you, are you that woman?”
“You never know,” I said. “But I’d like to know more about you. What do you do for fun other than spooning; what kind of books and films do you like?” He said that none of these things counted for anything when it came right down to it, and I said that it was interesting at the least, surely, and began to tell him what I was reading.
“Yeah yeah, whatever,” he said. I told him I’d been to an exhibition and he interrupted with, “Arty farty; I’m not into that.”
“So, what does interest you?” I asked him.
“Meeting you,” he said.
Really, this relationship was over already, following a characteristic online dating arc, beginning and ending only in cyberspace, but I was determined to have the bloody lunch. He said he would book a restaurant for Sunday. He’d choose. I wasn’t allowed to have a say. He sent a text. “I’m hugely excited about meeting you,” it said. And then a great silence fell. He didn’t reply to queries about place and time. Nor did he ring in the evening. Where were we supposed to be meeting on Sunday? Hello? Jonathan? No response. So I texted again. “Is everything okay with you?”
The reply buzzed in immediately. “Fine thanks, just busy. Regards, Jonathan.”
Regards? Regards, Jonathan? Just busy is an absolute giveaway. The decision to omit kisses is a big red danger signal. Regards is relationship kryptonite.
The following morning I tried again and sent another text message: “Beautiful day here; how’s your day going?”
Two hours later he texted back. “Am good too. Jonathan.”
Changes in a man’s mode of communicating are not usually accidental. I may have been intended to take the hint, but I blundered on, as is my way. On Saturday night, 11 p.m., and still no date confirmed, I texted him: “Are we having lunch tomorrow or not?”
The reply was five words long. “Met someone who can deliver.” Met someone who can deliver? I guessed that our date was off, then. While I was simmering, another text arrived. “Sorry for canceling. I need someone who can make a commitment and you didn’t seem sure.” Seriously? He expected a commitment to the long haul before we’d even met face to face? I sat on my hands and said nothing, and simmered some more. By Tuesday, there he was, back on the dating site, his online light lit. He was trawling for women again. I don’t think the someone who can deliver can have delivered. Or maybe she delivered enough.
One of the sites allowed me to limit my search to New Members only, people I hadn’t seen before, and so I filled in the requirements (which had relaxed a bit: pulse, teeth, lives in continent of Europe) and pressed the search button. Some of the new men had particularly jaded-sounding openers to their profile pages. “I don’t want to walk a dog along a beach, and have lunch in a pub with a fire. I’ve seen all the romcoms I’m ever going to see, and have drunk enough red wine cozily on sofas. Offer me something original if you want to grab my attention.” I wondered how this irritable tone went down. I couldn’t imagine replying to his invitation to offer something original, in the hopes that he’d deign to notice me, but perhaps he’d find someone equally grumpy and intolerant. What would they do in the evenings, when avoiding their sofa, I wondered—make pottery? Learn Portuguese? Well, each to their own. My sofa and I will never be parted. I should probably have mentioned, in my profile, how wedded I was to my big feather couch, and why my arse was that twin-potato shape.
I was learning to spot the men who were new to online dating. They arrived with a shiny new membership and very high expectations, as if they were going to find an order number alongside each of us and merely had to tick the box to get delivery. The man mentioned above listed the things he didn’t like in “a lady,” qualities that—I suspect—defined his ex-wife. Above all, he said, ladies should only contact him if they’d managed to overcome the urge to criticize. The urge to criticize him, I admit, was strong in me.
Dating sites are Darwinian places, but not everyone has to try too hard. The people who can afford to be prescriptive—in fact they can do what t
hey like—are the rich, successful men over six feet tall. If they also happen to be handsome, they live in a dating world of their own making. I noticed this profile page opener when I was bored one night and went man shopping, looking (though only for fun) at the ubersuave central London listees. “Cool, happy, successful executive and international traveler, divorced and fifty-two, looking for unique woman.” The rich man is used to living in a high-spec environment, and finding a mate seems no different. “When I find her, she’ll be a loving, unflappable, organized sporty can-do person; gentle, feminine, intelligent, tolerant, funny, sexy, honest, relaxed, charming to all and a passionate adventurer. She should have her own life, her own career, but also realize that nothing is more important than family.” Men like this are looking to breed, and they’re very clear what they need: they want willowy, high-achieving goddess types of saint-like temperament, who are ready to give up the fast lane to be barefoot and pregnant. The galling thing was that I knew for sure that he’d get hundreds of responses, because although he’d have a definite physical type in mind, he didn’t make any reference to it. The auditions were probably ongoing.
“Why are men like this even available?” I asked the dog. “Why would they need to go looking online?”
He didn’t say, but I could read his thought bubble. “They must be absolute shits.”