Mid-Life Ex-Wife

by Stella Grey

  But now there was Marc, who appeared to like me. Marc didn’t seem to be fazed by other people’s hesitations. He reminded me of a golden retriever I used to know. He didn’t take it badly if you didn’t want to play, but just waited stoically until you were ready. All of which made it easy, and also difficult, to navigate Wednesday’s third date expectations. The difficulty came in knowing whether he was serious. It was possible I was getting myself in a ferment about something that wasn’t even going to happen. But there isn’t any doubt that I was getting myself into a ferment.

  Third dates can be alarming things. On a third date it appears you’ve made a decision. Decisions are unavoidable, they’re woven in—even though it’s way too early to make decisions. Agreeing to a third date is usually going to be interpreted as interest in the possibility of the long haul. It’s at this crunch point that a difference of evaluation might become obvious. One person’s interest might tail off just as another’s crystallizes. The other person might need those three meetings to be sure you’re a No.

  I was worried that Marc might think we’d agreed to third-date sex. I knew in advance that I wasn’t going to be ready, not least because—in this case—the three dates had all taken place in the same week. Things had become compressed, and I really wasn’t ready. Even the idea of readiness was a new way to think. In the old days sex had always been spontaneous, when it happened. My ex-husband and I got together at a student party. First-date shagging ensued (it wasn’t really even a date) but we were barely adults, and it all seemed perfectly natural then. But now—now, self-consciousness was potentially going to be a big hurdle, just as it had been with Ralph at the beginning of all this. I couldn’t do much about that. It’s one of the paradoxes of fifty that one’s fearless in so many ways, but when it comes to focusing on the body . . . Being naked and saggy with a man you like is a risk; that’s just a fact. For some of us it’s only our clothes that are holding it all together. Even someone you like, and who likes you back, might find that they mind that. They might not be able to help it.

  So, Wednesday came. We had a glass of wine in a pub, and then Marc said he had a lovely bottle of white burgundy chilling in his fridge (decoded: “it’s sexy time, baby”). I was nervous about going into his flat with him, this man I didn’t really know, and the door closing behind us, and said so and he didn’t flinch. We sat out in his tiny city garden and drank the lovely wine. It got too cold to sit outside, and he said we should go in and warm up, and I said I hadn’t realized just how late it was, and that I ought to go. We stood at the entrance and kissed. He said, “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?” and I said I wasn’t ready. He walked me to the bus stop, and it rained, and we sheltered in a doorway, kissing again. Two teenage girls ran past with their coats over their heads. One said, just as she passed, to the other, “Did you see those two old people? That’s real passion. I want that.”

  After this I was away for five days on a long-arranged trip, and so there was quite a gap (perhaps at a critical time) in which Marc and I didn’t see one another. Texting was only possible intermittently. There was a lot of walking about holding my phone up, trying to get a signal, in order to receive messages and reply to them. His messages were not romantic ones, which was disappointing. I’ve always found affection via text and email reassuring, and heartwarming, when I’m away. There’s something about it that’s safe: a context for the trip that invites you home again, a loving backdrop to whatever you’re doing while apart. Emotional home fires are shown to continue to burn. In this case, I hoped for a little bit of smoldering. When we’d left each other on Wednesday the promise of sex had been hanging in the air, and there’d been a passionate kiss in a doorway, one that kept returning to my mind. The scene might have been set for a little romance. His texts, however, were perfunctory.

  To his own dating site motto, “Bland in the profile, friendly in the email, lively at the pub,” we should add, “Brief in the text message.” Which is fine, theoretically. People who are digitally monosyllabic are some of the warmest people I know. Digital affection isn’t their forte. But at the possible start of a possible something, on the brink of a relationship (and prone to pessimistic over-analysis), I would have hoped for more than “Have a great trip!” and “See you on Tuesday!” I would have hoped for kisses on the messages. I always sent two to him; we were at the two-kiss stage of things, in my own personal kiss hierarchy. Generally he sent one kiss, because I was at one-kiss status in his. While I was away, though, kisses were not offered. I continued to send the provocative two kisses on my updates from the Wi-Fi wilderness, to which he sent brief factual responses. He was working. He was fine. He was having a beer with colleagues. He was watching documentaries. He hoped I was having an interesting time. Smiley faces were used instead of kisses.

  I saw him on Tuesday night, just after getting home. “Can’t wait to see you,” he texted, just before I got back. One kiss was added (apparently I was now back in the kissing zone). Come round for dinner, he said; it’s only pasta, but it’ll save you having to cook. I suggested we meet at a pub instead, and eat there, and he agreed. We drank beer and ate pies, and I told him about the trip. He put one hand over mine when I’d finished and said, “You are going to want to sleep with me at some point, aren’t you?” I must have looked surprised. “It’s just that you don’t seem to want to come to the flat,” he said. “I was hoping for a different kind of reunion than this. That’s all.” He looked disappointed. “I want a sexual relationship with you.”

  This is one of the problems when dealing with people who are more or less strangers: knowing what’s normal to them. For him, polite curtness in texts was normal, and sex after two weeks and four dates was also normal. I, on the other hand, was unhesitatingly affectionate in words, in our interludes, but cautious about rushing into bed, and Marc found that combination the odd one. We talked some more about it, over another beer. I told him that I’d begun to associate going to his flat with sex, and still wasn’t ready. We were lucky to be in a pub anteroom, early in the evening, with no one else around to eavesdrop. He worried that I wasn’t attracted to him physically (I was massively attracted to him; I just needed more time). He let slip that he’d been back to the dating site in my absence. Though only to answer messages, he added quickly; he always answered his mail. Not answering invitations is rude, he asserted. Having always felt the same, I couldn’t exactly argue.

  “So do you have anyone waiting in the wings?” I asked, my suspicion and self-loathing mounting.

  “Not at all,” he said. He brought up the subject of my being hesitant again, and apologized for being pushy. He said I should take all the time I needed . . . but that he longed to know me better, and really knowing someone started with sex, and so he was impatient to begin. The statement started with his admitting that he’d been pushy, but ended with my feeling pressured again. (Of course I’d been through this situation before, or one that mirrored it, with Peter, who found that I expected sex at our first meeting. Poor man. I can’t help laughing.)

  Sex started just at the point at which I’d slightly lost track of the number of dates we’d had, which is probably the right number, for me. I didn’t feel I could hold off any longer; the weight of expectation was so heavy. And so, one night after the pub we went back to his flat and went to bed. We arrived at something, somewhere I was afraid might be the end, and that Marc was sure would be the beginning. The sex, you see, wasn’t great. I know—almost all first sex isn’t great. It so commonly isn’t that it’s almost a defining situation. I was really nervous, which didn’t help. I avoided a full unveiling by ensuring that we relocated from his sofa and out of bright light at a key moment. I sent him off ahead to close the blinds, and turned the already-dimmed main light off in his bedroom (he was amused), and approached the duvet with so much haste—hoping to be a blur—that I almost broke his nose. Part under the covers, I got the chance to present myself in the only way that I could bear to, in the dark, half aware th
at I was shielding my stomach with a carefully placed forearm. All that self-consciousness wasn’t ideal for letting go of the mind and becoming a sensory being.

  The momentous event took place in a silence that continued afterwards, when I lifted his arm to put my head on his shoulder. I had to go to the bathroom, and he turned on his lamp and made fun of me for feeling the need to put my shirt on; I dressed myself in it from a sitting position in the bed. It was essential that I did so, because I needed to avoid being seen standing up, in my full glory. (I was ready for sex but I wasn’t ready for that, not yet.) I’d chosen a loose shirt that falls to the thigh, for this occasion, so I could be casual about hiding myself, as if concealment were unplanned. I rushed off into the en suite, and galloped back attempting jollity, as if it had been fun. Isn’t it supposed to be fun? To be honest I just wanted to get home. When I came back to the bed he wondered if I’d like a strong drink, because he was having one.

  No explicit criticism of anything surrounding the question of performance was made; we didn’t talk about it. But I did wonder. There’s so much written, now, about male assumptions, about extreme grooming and the necessity of being toned, and being open to experiment so as not to have Boring Sex. I didn’t know how many other women he’d slept with, or if he watched a lot of porn; I wasn’t quite neurotic enough to ask. But a miasma of disappointment hung around us both for the rest of that evening, drinking gin on his masculine sofa, in his masculine pad. His home was a classic of the genre: all grays and blacks, and starkly plain: it was print-free, painting-free, with expensive lighting, and was full of technology, every room wired for sound. Giant fridge with ice-maker: check. Shower made for two: oh yes. The style of his home life was feeding into my nervousness: the fact that he had a lot of magazines (consumer, motor, music), and hardly any books; the fact that his music collection was all post-1990; the fact that his stove was far too shiny and new for someone who, according to his dating profile, liked to cook to relax. There was no clutter. He had no possessions. He appeared to be living in a show home and making no dents in it. I did find myself thinking: wow, we are really unalike.

  When I got home again, the post-sex text message I sent him had three kisses on it. His goodnight message had one. “Are we doing anything tonight?” I asked, the next morning.

  He didn’t answer until just before 8 p.m. “Sorry! Just got this. Not tonight. Tired.” No kisses: instead, that smiley emoticon, one smiling so insincerely that I wanted to poke it in the eye.

  I replied saying, “What about tomorrow? Film?”

  “Not tomorrow or day after; my mother’s here,” he said. “But I’m free the day after that.”

  At the cinema, the day his mother returned home, we ate popcorn and he held my other hand on his lap. When we came out he asked, “Are you coming back to mine?” and I said that I was and we smiled at each other. We drank red wine in his kitchen and trashed the film satisfyingly, and then he picked up the bottle and said, “Come on, let’s go and finish this somewhere more comfortable,” before leading the way to his bed. I was enormously attracted to him, but nonetheless more nervous than the first time, which shouldn’t even have been possible. He decided he was going to take my clothes off, which should have been sexy but was actually unspeakably awkward. Somewhere along the way, from the end of a long marriage to there, I’d become more physically gauche than I’d ever been in my life. “Hey, just relax,” he kept saying, which didn’t help. He started coaching me a little bit. A “tell me what you like” mutual conversation is good, but being coached isn’t likely to make a person less anxious.

  I was wearing another giant cotton shirt, which I’d dropped beside the bed, ready for reaching down to and putting on before standing up (again). I didn’t ever do that with my ex-husband. “We’ve just had sex; why are you hiding from me?” Marc said when I returned from the bathroom. He was looking at his phone; he was the kind of person who used natural intervals to check his messages. I asked how his mother’s visit had gone, and he said it was fine, and didn’t say more. He got up to put music on, an album from a band I didn’t know, a series of mediocre love dirges. He said he’d been to their gig and liked their stuff. I asked if he had any old music on his iPod, and he seemed to think I meant the 1980s. He didn’t like eighties stuff, he volunteered; it reminded him too much of his childhood. What about the seventies, I said; don’t you like the music of the seventies? And what about Schubert? He shrugged. I asked why he didn’t have pictures; he said he liked plain walls. I asked where he kept his books. He said he found paper books untidy and preferred to read on his Kindle. He rarely read books at all, in fact, he said, because magazines were all he had time for. I realized, looking around, that Marc was a neat freak minimalist.

  On the way home I began arguing with myself. It was one of the Jims, from a few weeks back, who’d said, “This is probably not a goer long term, but how do you feel about short-term fun?” That is how you need to think of this, I told myself. Stop second-guessing the outcome. Relax, and enjoy having someone in your life. Get to know him. Give it time. Build bridges. Learn something; teach something. Smile more. Go out to places, together. Stop thinking all the time, and enjoy the sex; the sex will improve. (People who’ve been married a long time before being flung out of their usual orbit into the unknown: they might have to give themselves these pep talks.)

  I went to sleep feeling better, but was woken at 2 a.m. by my phone. Marc. He was going clubbing the following night, the text said, and had friends coming back to stay over. “I don’t imagine clubs are your thing,” he’d added.

  “No, they’re not my scene,” I replied. “But that’s okay; go clubbing, have fun, have fun with your friends.” (I was replying like I was his mother. It was a heart-sinking moment.) “We don’t have to see each other all the time,” I wrote, now absolutely miserable. “I’m sorry I was so tense tonight, again,” I added. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I’m wondering if it’s something to do with all the trouble and rejection that I’ve had, in previous attempts at dating; it’s been bad for my confidence.” (Here we were, being straightforward with each other via text in the middle of the night, in a way we weren’t able to, face to face.)

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” his next text message said, “but I’m not ready to be fifty; I’m not even ready to be forty-two, to be honest.” I stood staring at the screen. He was breaking up with me. By text. “You’re a lovely woman,” he wrote, “but I don’t think this is going to work. To be honest, it kind of feels like you’re in a different generation to me.”

  A few days later, I called the midlife posse together (all of us are divorced) and met up with them for a bottle of wine. Several bottles. “Evidently I am terrible in bed,” I told them. “Even though I love sex; even though sex makes me happy.” My girlfriends rallied round. Of course you’re not terrible in bed, they protested, eyeing each other and trying not to laugh. Why had I said that I had a boyfriend, at last? What I’d really had was an extended audition. Chief Sensible Friend said that it only looked that way in retrospect. Her view was that Marc went into the relationship in good faith and with high hopes, just like I did, but then—“Because I am terrible in bed!” I interjected. “Even though I love sex; even though sex makes me happy.” (This is what happens. I get repetitive on the fourth glass of wine.)

  She reminded me that I’d also sensed that it was a mistake. “You were already detaching yourself, once you’d been to his flat and saw that he had no books and that he listens to club anthems. It’s your basic inescapable culture clash. He sounds like one of those perpetual boys, the ones with the Converse sneakers and skinny jeans, who are still into clubbing and drugs; it’s all a big yawn.”

  It was true. What had I been doing with Marc? We were completely incompatible. “Maybe, but he’s still only forty-two,” I told her. “Some forty-two-year-olds still think they’re in their thirties. They cling on to youth. I’ve given up the clinging. I’m ready to embrace
middle age. I long for cozy sex again, like I had with my ex, before he had his head turned and went off.” (It’s possible that the other woman was offering something other than cozy marital coupling, however.)

  “Do you know what I blame?” Chief Sensible Friend asked. “Porn—that’s what I blame. Men have got over-visual about sex. They do sex more with their eyes now, when they used to do it with their hands.”

  “Well, if they do it with their eyes we’re all stuffed,” I said, and we laughed, in a sad knowing way, because we’re all midlife and look our ages and don’t usually have an issue with that. “The trouble is,” I told them, “that all this is making me visually aware of myself, too. I saw myself via an out-of-body experience, when I was in bed with Marc, and that was paralyzing.”

  “You didn’t fit,” she said. “That simple. A bad fit. He’s never been married, for a start. His adult life has been divided into six- and eight-year relationships, one after another. He’s a classic operator of the seven-year itch, and you really don’t want to get into that.”

  But why had Marc been with me in the first place? It occurred to me for the first time that there might be a reason that certain men favored the menopausal. The ones who were determined never to marry or have children (to be encumbered, was how Marc put it) might be attracted to older women, and fifty is probably the youngest older woman there is. Whatever the case, it was clear that Marc used the culture clash as an excuse, when it was really the sex that was the issue. For me it was really the culture clash. I saw his apartment, and what it said about him, and heard him say that he disliked books because they’re dusty, and knew we were doomed.