by Stella Grey
Back at the site where I’d left the cleavage/evening dress picture up, I began to get hostile messages from men I’d rebuffed. Several young ones now thought it disgusting that fifty-year-old women should be there looking for sex. What did my being fifty conjure up for them? Did they see someone on the verge of decrepitude, about to be elderly, on the downward slope to the bus pass, the pac-a-mac, coupons, bungalows and yellowing net curtains? Did they foresee trouble with hills and stairs, a retreat into orthopaedic footwear and elasticated trousers, false teeth and tinned ham, bargain rails on a Monday afternoon, library books changed once a week, a deck chair on the seafront and quiz shows at teatime and death? Not that there’s anything wrong with most of those things; I’ll even admit to being keen on some of them (aside from death, which is a bit of a downer). The psychology was debatable, but one thing seemed really clear. When someone on a dating site appears to announce that she’s ready for sex, she’s treated rather differently to a woman in a Fair Isle sweater, having a picnic in a field with daisies around her.
One of the dating site men who saw the cleavage photograph, before it was deleted everywhere, was a twenty-four-year-old called Joe, a serious-looking man with a bicycle, a flat cap and a full nineteenth-century beard. He invited me to meet him for a drink: my first hipster invitation. I responded saying I was flattered, but way too old for him.
“I’m not interested in age, and you looked stunning in that picture,” he replied. “Why did you take it down?”
“Because I’m not really that woman,” I told him. “And thank you, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable dating somebody so young.”
“That’s agist of you, I must say,” he said. “Anyway, who’s talking about dating? I want to meet you for sex. I can assure you that I’m an experienced, generous and able lover. What do you say?”
“I say you’re mad. The reality of a fifty-year-old body is going to take you by surprise.”
I scrutinized his profile again. He liked European cities and historic sites and museums. We engaged in a brief flurry of friendly messaging about these things, sharing our enthusiasms. Fundamentally, he was an urban male, which was refreshing: none of his photographs showed him conquering white water. My instinct said we’d get along. My instinct also said no, NO NO NO, not even a cup of coffee, NO, NO. Partly this was self-protection, because he’d made it clear that he had no interest in anything other than sex, and I might fall for him and fall hard, all alone. Nothing frightens me more than that. It wasn’t ever going to be anything other than mutual sexual gratification . . . which I was badly in need of, that’s true, but I wasn’t about to reveal my fifty-year-old body to a twenty-four-year-old male, not unless he was a doctor and circumstances were entirely professional, and even then maybe not. Despite the Sam Taylor-Woods of this world, falling in love with a man half your age seldom turns out well. Colette covered this pretty well in Chéri.
“Won’t you at least meet me once?” Joe persisted. “Girls of twenty-four bore me to death.”
“Be more discriminating,” I told him. “They’re out there, the women with similar interests to you; you just need to put in the hours.”
“I know plenty of pretty girls with similar interests,” he said. “But I don’t want to have sex with them. Won’t you at least meet me, just for a drink?”
“I’m really flattered, but no,” I said. “I wish you luck, though. It’s been fun chatting.”
Closing the laptop, there was food for thought: the sweet, appealing Joe had offered, and I’d turned him down. It didn’t seem to be sex that I was looking for. No-strings frolicking had been handed on a plate more than once now, and I had not taken the plate. What was it that I wanted? Was it that most cliché-ridden concept of all, everlasting love, holding hands in the street like the lovely old people who lived on my road and doddered along together holding on tight?
At a bookshop that afternoon, I dared myself to chat to a man there on his own. It’s easier to talk to strangers in bookshops than somewhere people are moving, like supermarket aisles. Men in bookshops are fairly slow to react, which is a plus when you’re in pursuit of them; they’re standing, lulled by words and thoughts, their flight impulse slowed to reading speed; and in general, people who can’t stop buying books are open to chatting with others of similar affliction. I was having a splurge, and had piled eight volumes in my hands, balancing them against my chest and chin, and then I realized that the Heathcliff-handsome reader of A Hundred Years of Solitude from the coffee shop was standing in front of me, in a leather jacket.
I said, “When you can’t carry any more, it’s probably time to pay and go home.” I smiled at him. He smiled back. But then he returned to browsing. I swept past him, close enough to smell his fragrance, and turned on one heel and grinned like a lunatic. “I’m bringing a Sherpa next time,” I said. He didn’t acknowledge this. I went down a level to the ground floor and paid up, feeling utterly dejected.
“I don’t really want a lot,” I told the universe, while standing queuing. “I can be flexible. I just want someone funny and loyal. Everything else is negotiable, I swear.”
“The thing is,” the universe said, “that despite what you say now, you have far too many expectations.”
Out in Open Water
WINTER, YEAR ONE
Kinky Week was one of the strangest periods of the whole dating project. First there was an approach from a man who liked to wear adult-sized nappies and be treated as a baby by his lover. He was sure I would enjoy it. He wrote explaining that this isn’t as rare a peccadillo as I might assume; there were quite a number of people in the UK who shared this fantasy, as he knew from the group he belonged to. He went on to explain how our relationship would work. He hadn’t been happy since he was a small child, he said, and he craved the safety of being with Mummy again. (And having sex with her? I like to think I’m fairly broad-minded but this was just too weird.) He tended to write to women of fifty-plus, he added, as there were lots of us who’d missed out on having a child, to whom this might appeal.
Shortly after this there was a one-liner from a mid-fifties man in a panama hat, his name an obvious alias, asking if I’d talk to him on Instant Messenger. He said he couldn’t tell me his name as he was rather well known. “Actor? Politician?” I asked him.
“Might be one of those,” he conceded. He confessed that it wasn’t his photograph, either, and I told him that I don’t talk to men who need to stay in disguise.
“No names, no pack drill,” he replied. “Don’t be a sourpuss. Let’s have a fun conversation on Instant Messenger.”
“Not tonight, I’m too tired, but write to me, write me a letter,” I told him. He wanted to go straight to a porn experience; I wanted mail from Cyrano de Bergerac. Preferably, in fact, from Steve Martin playing C.D. Bales playing Cyrano de Bergerac.
“Don’t be afraid,” the nameless man messaged back. “I just want to talk to you. Five minutes. What’s the worst that could happen?” It was a good question. The box opened on the screen, ready for him to type and for me to reply in real time, the cursor pulsing in it. “Good to talk to you,” he wrote there—the words appeared on the screen as he typed them. “Is this your first time? Instant Messenger virgin?”
“No, but I don’t much like it,” I typed.
“Does it make you feel bad and dirty?”
“It didn’t until then.”
There was a long pause before he replied. “You’re funny. What else are you apart from funny? Are you a naughty girl?” The light lit by his name came and went. As it only illuminated when the other person was (literally) on the same page as you, and as his was blinking on and off, my guess was that he was leaving and rejoining the conversation. My guess was that he was talking to more than one of us at once. “Are you a naughty girl who needs a little punishment?” he asked me.
“Don’t understand,” I wrote, though I had a pretty good idea.
“Will you be my lady?” he asked me. “And will you be my wh
ore?” I didn’t reply. His little light pulsed. After a much longer pause he typed: “I have a hairbrush here. Bend over and take your knickers off. I’m going to use it on you, because you are bad.”
“This isn’t my thing,” I told him. “Bye. Good luck. Bye.”
Some time after this, a man who had seemed perfectly nice up until then, in two or three evenings of on-screen chat, asked me if I ever fantasized about being raped. “No,” I told him, remaining studiously calm. “I don’t think anybody does.”
“I don’t mean real rape,” he said. “Obviously.”
“What’s unreal rape?” I asked him.
He told me it was the sort in which a woman wasn’t keen to start with, but subsequently yielded and became aroused and had the best orgasm of her life.
And then there was Clive. Clive also wanted to go straight to Instant Messenger, without even really saying hello. This time I was armed. “Are you a spanker?” was my first question. He said he wasn’t, but that he was sexually dominant, and was looking for a woman willing to explore a passive role in bed. (“Explore” was too active a verb, perhaps, but I let that pass.) Now, passivity’s not my thing: it doesn’t have healthy relationship connotations, for me. But I went to his profile page anyway, because I was curious, and found it was unlike any other I’d so far seen. Clive appeared to be an aristo-kink. He’d done that whole public school/Oxford/the army/the City thing, he said, and had inherited, and didn’t any longer have an alarm clock. His photograph showed him on a fine horse. I went back to the message box and asked how he spent his days. He said he was lucky in so far as he didn’t need to work, aside from managing the estate. Otherwise he spent his life traveling and writing and painting, but had to admit that since his wife died, he was lonely.
Thinking back to how I replied to this, I have to admit to being deeply embarrassed. I more or less applied formally for consideration. I more or less advocated myself as a suitable wife for a baronet. I might even have said how much I felt at home in National Trust houses. Things appeared to have switched; now it looked as if it were me who was having the fantasy. Clive’s response was to ask if we could have Instant Messenger sex, which would work by each of us writing what we were doing to the other, in real time on the screen, so as to create a scenario. He was going to be the lord, and I’d be a servant girl. Evidently he was going to get off on this. I, on the other hand, was getting off the internet.
It was only afterwards that I had the reaction. What evidence did I have that Clive was Clive? It’s possible, probable, that I wasn’t talking to the man I thought I was. He could have downloaded that photograph from anywhere; he could have made up all that stuff about his charmed life; he could have been 100 percent a fake. The internet is a perfect vehicle for all sorts of subterfuge. He could have been anybody: an unpleasant man, an abuser, a criminal—who knows? It’s more likely than not that he adopted a gentrified persona so as to enact dominance fantasies with women online, women he had no intention of ever meeting. I was gullible, and I was a snob, and I felt like an idiot. Never again, I vowed.
The feeling that the online world was becoming gradually more remote from my unquestionably rather conventional needs was put to an end by being asked out for a drink by a man who looked as normal as pie. His name was Marc, and he lived about two miles away, and he was an engineer. He was eight years younger, and wavy-haired and hazel-eyed and—judging by the site pictures—wasn’t afraid of a man bag.
When he messaged me, using the dating site system, he’d only been on the website for a few days, having been single for a while after a six-year relationship. He said I had lovely eyes, and that we seemed to have a lot in common. “In fact,” he said, “didn’t I see you at the cinema on your own, last Sunday afternoon?” He named a French film I had indeed been at on my own. He liked old French movies too. Did I fancy having a beer one night? “I note that you like beer, which is excellent,” he wrote. “If you also like Mexican food it’s going to be a great night.” I didn’t have to consider. This wasn’t a man who’d asked if he could blow raspberries on my thighs, or who wanted to know what size my nipples were. We would have an ordinary date, and talk, I hoped, and that’s exactly what we did. We had a beer, and ate together, and it was fine, in the end.
Marc had come straight from work and was somewhat crumpled, his hair unruly, a smudge on his face he had no idea was there. He was at a corner table, reading the paper, when I arrived, and he looked completely relaxed about meeting me. I, on the other hand, had spent all afternoon trying on clothes, and sighing at my reflection, and saying, NO NO you look TERRIBLE IN THAT. “You look like a middle-aged man in drag,” I told myself, peeling off what had been—pre the ice-cream phase of the divorce—a dress I could once rely on to be flattering. I couldn’t get my hair to dry properly; it kinked in bizarre directions. I put my thumb through my new tights, right on the shin, and had to chuck them. I wore the trusty (voluminous) navy blue frock, and put pearls on and took them off, and put makeup on in too dim a light and had to redo it, and swapped heels for flats and back to heels, and my heart beat hard all the way there in the cab. My face insisted on perspiring. I almost didn’t go. I almost canceled at the last minute because it was too hard, it was just too hard and why put yourself through this when you don’t have to, when you could have a quiet, happy little solitary life doing your own thing with no one to answer to? This was the kind of thought spiral I got into in the cab.
Marc didn’t look appalled by my appearance—in fact he looked relieved. He kissed me on the cheek and stroked my upper arm at the same time. Our eyes met and lingered; he’d been out in sunshine all day and the hazel was flecked with green, and there was something about his gaze that could make a girl blush. Our eyes kept meeting and lingering, while we talked about work, and cinema, and chat that led on from that. He said he’d only had one date so far—it had been their first and last, he added. They’d struggled to find things to talk about, he said, but nonetheless she’d taken it for granted that there would be sex afterwards, and he’d found himself saying that he didn’t do that until the third date. We laughed. If I became a little manic, treating him to a perhaps overly frank emotional CV, telling funny stories in rapid fire, that was okay. I was nervous. He didn’t mind. When it was obvious to us both that I was gabbling, he’d just stare at me, and his mouth would crinkle up, and he’d say, “You can relax, you know. Shall we have another beer?”
By my reckoning we had five, spread over three hours, with lots of tacos and ceaseless talking, most of that admittedly mine. And then we split the bill, and went out onto the street, and he hailed me a cab, and kissed me on the mouth, and said, “Sunday—are you free on Sunday for a walk?” I said I was. He said he was sure the walk would be fun. After that, Wednesday—was I free on Wednesday to go to a film? He’d get tickets. I said that would be nice. While the cab stood purring, waiting for me, he kissed me again, and for longer. He said, “You know, Wednesday will be our third date.”
On Sunday’s walk, ambling along, talking about cheese, he remarked suddenly that I wasn’t anything like as fierce as he’d thought I’d be.
“Fierce?” I inquired, not entirely gently.
“Yes,” he said “—judging by the things you say about yourself on the profile, your academic interests, the antireality-TV jihad, I expected . . .”
I explained that I did that to save time. “It’s just a filter,” I said. “It’s getting straight to the things that aren’t negotiable.” Lots of them, of course, were negotiable, but it was true that I was becoming more and more specific about myself, online. This, without doubt, was to do with my age. It was a way of shoring myself up. In a marketplace geared to superficial allure, it was a way of asserting other priorities and values, a way of feeling less invisible and more substantial. This is me; I’m interesting; look how interesting and diverse I am (I said, without actually saying it), and if a small waist’s more important to you, YOUR LOSS, BUDDY. “You,” I said to Marc, as we strol
led along the riverbank, “are not really there in your profile. You give nothing away.”
“Well, that’s my policy,” he said. “Bland in the profile, friendly in the email, lively at the pub. That’s how the men do it.” This answer was so pat that he must have read it somewhere, I thought.
Or maybe not. It became swiftly clear that Marc was naturally decisive. Even after one date he seemed to assume that we were together, our searches over and done with, though of course it was possible he’d been the same with a string of others. (I couldn’t help thinking this. It had become ingrained.) By Sunday he was holding my hand and saying things like, “Maybe we should go away somewhere interesting for a weekend.” It’s hard to react honestly to this kind of thing, this rushing ahead. The heart wants to leap with joy. The mind tells it to cool it, and slow down. In this case, the mind won the argument, and no Airbnb listings were scrolled through. But it’s interesting how different life is, when—after a long drought—it appears that you might have a boyfriend. There’s so much free time, for a start, when you’re not obsessively trawling dating sites and trying to get perfectly ordinary blokes even to reply to you. That pursuit had become seriously time-depleting, of late, because the more they didn’t want to talk to me, the more determined I became to break through. I was turning into a person who spent a lot of time trying to convince people of things. I’d spent a lot of time implying my own attractiveness to a whole host of men who couldn’t really have given a toss.