Mid-Life Ex-Wife

by Stella Grey

  Having said that, if I’d been a woman with no qualms whatsoever about revealing her stomach to a lover in broad daylight, things would have been a lot simpler on the dating front, with Marc and also in general.

  My pal Jack reacted as I anticipated he would. First sex with a new lover should be passionate and exciting, he said. It should make you blush, the next day, when you’re walking to work and you have flashbacks. It should make you smile, remembering how naughty it was. You can’t expect to have cozy sex with a new boyfriend, he said; everything hinges on the sex. But that can’t be true for everyone. It isn’t. I know of middle-aged people who’ve shacked up with other midlifers, both of them happy to under-achieve in bed. In dating site terms, it’s another obstacle, another filter, one I need to consider. Perhaps there should be another field to fill in on the dating profile. What kind of sex do you like? Choose. Hairless or Hairy? Theatrics or Cozy? Gymnastic or Chatty? Performance or Easy? Noisy and demonstrative, or Married-A-Long-Time style?

  A few days later I saw Marc on the street. I wasn’t looking where I was going and almost bumped into him. He nodded at me, a wary nod of acknowledgment, and I grinned back. I found I didn’t mind that he’d dumped me. It wouldn’t have worked, and so it was actually okay. I hope I said this to him silently, through the vehicle of a wide smile, as we passed by one another on the pavement.

  Needing to cast the net wider (again) I joined an expensive site that promised to deliver via the use of highly scientific (they claimed) matching software. Having used it, I can tell you that I’m fairly sure that if my parents had depended on that service, rather than meeting at a dance hall, if they’d ever been deconstructed by a questionnaire about their likes and dislikes and fed separately into a dating algorithm, they wouldn’t ever have met. They wouldn’t even have known that the other existed, having been prevented from meeting someone so obviously unsuitable by the selection system. He was into Beethoven. She is into Big Band dance music. He was a reclusive artist and gardener, forever in old painty clothes. She likes high heels and holidays. She eats Mediterranean, and rarely red meat, and he was a roast beef man. She reads romances; he never read fiction at all, and brought his six history books back each Saturday from the library. He liked old Westerns, and she’s a family drama watcher. They had the happiest marriage I’ve ever encountered and wouldn’t have been paired up on a dating site in a million years. Their being different was what made the marriage stimulating. It meant that each joined the other in their interests, and life was broadened. It was that unquantifiable extra dimension, unconditional love, that made it all synthesize into happiness. Compatibility can’t actually be predicted by science.

  I wasn’t taken even with the premise of matches being delivered and access being denied to the pool. Another website I used listed candidates in descending order of compatibility, giving a percentage score. At least in that case they gave me the whole picture, and it was possible to have a look at the 35 percenters. Some of my most fun on-screen conversations were with 35 percenters. If you were to feed my old friends into the sausage machine they might not score better than that.

  The algorithmic wonder site didn’t allow me to see its workings at all. There were no hints or clues. I answered 250 multiple-choice questions, paid up, and the machine began to deliver people to my inbox. The results were baffling. Nobody was bookish or into art and culture and some offerings were distinctly of the conservative sort. I know I have written in praise of difference, but this idea can be taken too far. Besides which, where were the similar people to add to the mix? There were no similar people. What was the algorithm playing at? Perhaps it was displaying a sense of humor. Perhaps its offering of right-wing philistine K2-climbers was a joke they liked to play on couch potatoes.

  On the first day I was matched with an anxious-looking bloke in the Midlands who wanted “a traditional wife” plus three Americans. One of them was a big tattooed biker who lived in Nebraska. A puzzled email to one of the site administrators drew the response that whether or not I liked the look of the guys in Birmingham and Nebraska, they were my best matches and that was that. Pages and pages of Americans began to arrive, hunched-shouldered men pictured in small sitting rooms in small towns, patiently waiting for love to be offered out of the worldwide web. Some of them were poignantly undeservedly alone, widowed by cancer, looking for help with motherless children (there’s a book to be written, Castaway style, in agreeing to take on a stranger in a shack in Tennessee, but I am not that woman). Some were holed up in Arizona, pictured with cabinets full of guns—there were proud pictures of the guns—and some others were divorced red-pill types, in a rage about womankind. These men had serious trouble, in their profiles, in squaring their general misogyny with a friendly, wooing sort of tone. The information that you dislike and disdain womankind in general, but are sure there are exceptions, isn’t recommended as a chat-up line.

  I tried to be open to matches based in the UK, purely on the grounds of value. I was paying top dollar for this service and was determined to persist. I wrote a bland hello message to a handful of the men I’d been paired with. “Hello, I see we’ve been matched; isn’t this funny as we have nothing in common that I can see, but hello and how are you today?” I was interested in the responses I’d get. Perhaps an email conversation would result that would reveal that the algorithm was indeed as brilliant as it claimed, that it had bypassed the banal and gleaned deeper personal truths. But no one replied to me—not one person. They’d looked at my profile and had seen the truth, writ large.

  As winter gave way to spring, a reply arrived in my inbox from Miles, a man I’d written to eight months before. Miles opened by apologizing drily for the delay. Round-faced with wild gray hair, Miles was an academic and lived an hour away by train. His profile picture, I recalled, was rather dapper (three-piece suit, tie: a picture probably taken at a wedding), and he’d come over, on his page, as a glass-three-quarters-full person, consumed by enthusiasms; his only complaint about life was that there’s not enough time.

  Following a flurry of mutually reassuring emailing, establishing that there was conversational potential, I was invited to lunch a few days later. The day came, and after a morning of trying and rejecting dresses, opting instead for jeans, boots, a T-shirt and blazer, subtle makeup, big jewelry, I took the train nervously to his town, to meet at a restaurant he’d suggested. In fact, this was plan B. Originally he’d asked me to his house, which was in a village a further short drive away. “Sod the protocol; come to my place on Sunday and I’ll cook you lunch and we’ll walk across the fields in the afternoon,” he’d written. What seems normal and sensible to one person—a few minutes’ lift from the station—is impossible to others. I’m not able to get into a strange man’s car unless the word taxi is printed somewhere on it, and even then I’m circumspect. I sometimes get spooked in a black cab, catching the driver’s eye in the mirror, aware of the red light of the locked doors. I was cured at a young age of the urge to go to a stranger’s house. There was a man in the children’s playpark, when I was ten, who hung around to talk to me on summer evenings, and who insisted on “helping” me swing; he’d pull the swing seat back, while I was sitting on it, so that my bum was pressed against him. He’d urged me to come to his flat one weekend to help make a cake, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was an obedient child and so I agreed. My poor mother almost fainted when I happened to mention, after Saturday breakfast, where I was going. “Never never never,” she’d said to me, half hugging and half shaking me. These life lessons are difficult to shrug off.

  Miles thought I was being a little over-cautious. Caution will gain us nothing, at this stage of our lives, he said. As he was about to turn sixty this was perhaps a little over-inclusive, as I didn’t feel I was quite at the bucket list stage of things, but never mind. I’d already checked his identity online; tenured academics are easy to check up on, at least. Maybe you could cook for me on the second meeting, I suggested, trying to be friendly a
nd neutralize the apparent over-fastidiousness about safety. Retrospectively, I think I should have been far bolder about that, and disinclined to be defensive. Let’s not ever be remotely defensive or embarrassed about safety. Let’s be less tolerant of an attitude that expects us to make an exception of someone because he’s obviously one of the good guys. No one should make a woman feel she’s accusing a man of something, in refusing to get into his car. Anyway, Miles’s reaction to the suggestion that he cook on the second date was positive. Good plan, he said; let’s do that. Then he sent me another email, the night before we met, with pictures of his house, a new-build partly designed by him. Beneath the photographs there were thoughts about what he might make for lunch on our second date.

  We decided to meet at the restaurant. After that, we’d mooch, he decided, around the streets. There was interesting mooching to be had, he said. “How long can you stay?” he asked me. “It’d be a shame just to come for lunch. Let’s make a day of it: stay for an early-evening drink, perhaps an early supper somewhere, before heading home.”

  “I can easily do that, what a lovely idea, and thank you,” I replied. I organized a dog-sitter to cover my being away all day.

  By the time I got to the bistro it was raining heavily. Miles texted to say he’d be late. I texted back to say I was already at the table. When he arrived, the man striding toward me, his wide mouth wider yet with grinning, looked a bit different to the person in the profile picture—but then no doubt so did I. He was wearing a cotton polo neck and giant plaid shirt. He was broader, and looked a decade older than in the picture, and was balding. I wasn’t attracted to him, but I’ve learned not to make snap judgments. Sexual chemistry isn’t always immediate. Sometimes it builds softly and surprises you. (I have subsequently met lots of women who agree with this, but haven’t met a man who does.)

  We ordered, and talked a bit about being single in midlife. He’d been divorced for almost ten years, and in the last four of those hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than a month. Perhaps you’re too choosy, I told him; my mother’s sure that I am. He didn’t pick up and run with any of the personal cues I offered, throughout our meeting; he didn’t go on to ask about my mother, or about my family or my origins, or my career. He found biographical chat dull, and wanted to talk about ideas, which was fun at the start, though somewhat exhausting over a long period. I did wonder if he was putting the lunch onto a tutorial footing. There was something vaguely interview-like about the setup, as all the questions were his, and the ideas his, and I was the one called upon to respond.

  We ate fish and drank white wine—I drank almost all of it, as he was driving—and drank coffee, and then I excused myself and went to the loo. As I rose from the table, which was the first time he’d seen me standing up, his eyes went to my hips and thighs (my belly and arse, unforgivingly clothed in denim) and his smile faltered. It didn’t just fade; it actually fell away. It’s safe to say that he was horrified. When I returned—his face was still grim—it turned out that he’d already paid the bill, and he wouldn’t let me contribute. There comes a point at which insisting on paying half becomes an argument; I tried to insist but he wouldn’t budge. I left a generous tip instead. “This has been fun,” he said. “It’s tremendous to meet new people.” (I’m sorry to say that this “nice to have met you” routine is almost always a kiss-off.)

  We stood in the porch of the restaurant, under its awning, the rain hammering on it. He’d already made his decision. Miles, who is heavily set, sturdy in frame, his rounded midlife tummy pushing out at the cotton of his shirt, was about to make his escape. He may have had the shape of the habitual sitter at a desk, a physical flaw I’d already forgiven, but he couldn’t bring himself to continue talking to me, despite having initiated the plan for the day. He wanted to abandon the date and wasn’t embarrassed about it. The plan was abruptly jettisoned. Not that he said so. He just acted as if we were both in a rush. He looked at his watch. He looked at his phone and frowned. “I could give you a lift to the train,” he said, “but to be honest you’d be as quick to walk.”

  “Oh,” I said, aware I sounded disappointed. “So you’re heading straight home? I thought we were going to mooch?” He had work to mark, Miles explained, not looking at me, and it was raining, so best call it a day. He said goodbye and went over to a big silver car, unlocking it and glancing at me, raising a farewell hand, as I opened my umbrella and crossed the road toward the station.

  He didn’t reply to my thank-you text, sent in the early evening, thanking him for paying for lunch. Nor did he reply to the second one, asking if we were still on for Sunday. He’d said, before we met, that he was going to make me the best chicken casserole I’d ever tasted, and the best apple strudel in the universe. He’d said, before we met, planning the Sunday we would have together, that I should get a train mid-morning, and he’d pick me up from the station. We’d eat, and then we’d walk through the fields and woods near his house. After that, he’d make cocktails; he had an incredible Shetland gin, he said, and grew limes in his conservatory.

  But that was all before we met, and he caught sight of my arse encased in old jeans, and decided against. He didn’t reply to either of my messages. Instead, he added me to a mailing list for receipt of his daily email, a bulletin detailing the ups and downs of the day, bloopers from exam papers, a miscellany from his life. I didn’t really understand what he thought our relationship was. Was it really okay, in his world, in his mind, to see a woman once and never mention it again, as if it didn’t happen, and ignore her messages, but treat her like a buddy for the rest of his life? Apparently so.

  Next there was an invitation from Lee (Leopold), an Austrian by birth. He was forty-seven, divorced, childless, and said that he balanced his “suit life,” the uniform and obligations of the working week, by having Sunday adventures on a (huge muscly) motorbike. He’d only recently returned from a midlife gap year. He’d seen quite a lot of the world on his bike, traveling around it alone.

  He wrote asking if we could meet for a drink. I should have said, “Yes, that’d be lovely, shall we say Friday at 7?” That’s how sane people respond. But I had to put Lee through the many hoops I had devised. He had to run round the course like a sheepdog, over barricades and jumps and through tunnels. The big email preamble hadn’t worked before, but nonetheless I found myself attempting it again, because my confidence was low. Officially I’d shrugged off the summary rejection by Miles, though the truth was that the experience had bruised me.

  My charm offensive appeared to work. “I have a good feeling about this,” Lee wrote, after we’d messaged solidly for four days. “I want to meet you soon as possible. I hope this isn’t too forward.”

  I replied with: “I’m available on Saturday for dinner, and then sex afterward. That’s how you do too forward, hahaha.”

  I thought it was reasonably funny—I wasn’t actually serious, as I felt the need to point out in a second message—but online humor with strangers is always risky. Lee didn’t think it was at all funny. I’m only able to assume this, because he didn’t answer. It’s embarrassing when this happens, when you embark on banter and find the other person isn’t joining in. You can’t see them, but you imagine their pursed mouth and muttered disapproval. And then you feel like an idiot. What’s the female version of being left with your dick hanging out? I looked again at his profile, searching harder for hints hidden in the prose. Occasionally there are warning signs in a dating profile, like the silver sixpences in Christmas puddings that used to break people’s teeth. Lee had said that he was “self-contained,” which can be a red flag. Not always, but sometimes.

  Lee’s pick would need to be A Hundred Percent Woman, he’d written. He’d used the word feminine three times. I intuited that my response hadn’t been very ladylike. I messaged him. “I’d like to play Q and A with you. Let’s play Q and A! I’ll start. Yes/no questions only. Scrabble: yes or no?” I waited, looking at my phone every five minutes, confident that a d
ull evening was about to be enlivened. It wasn’t. Nothing. Silence emanated, noisily. I had a long bath and a soap bubble conversation with myself, out loud in the echoey bathroom. “Why are these men so bloody wet?” I asked it. “Why are they so easily scared off? Can’t they rise to the challenge and at least be playful?”

  The following day I heard from Lee. Perhaps we should meet, he said, though he felt he had to be upfront and say he had reservations about me. (Isn’t that a charming thing to tell somebody? For heaven’s sake. Either meet or don’t meet: don’t “feel the need to be honest” and tell someone they might not be good enough.) “Oh,” I said, “reservations—and what are those? Is my sense of humor not feminine enough?”

  “It’s true that I was deterred by your apparent offer of sex on our first date,” he said, “and though you assured me you were joking, I’m not sure that you were joking, entirely.” (This was also aggravating.) “I like to take things really slowly,” he continued. I told him that, as it happened, I did too. “So we should meet and have that dinner,” he said. “Let’s meet and see if we hit it off.”

  “I don’t know if you really want to get into anything, even a ninety-minute encounter over steak and chips, with someone who objects to their humor being critiqued as unfeminine,” I said.

  “Femininity is important to me,” he said, “and it probably is to you too; I think we’re just using language in different ways.” I didn’t think it was that. “Bear in mind that I’m Johnny Foreigner,” he added (with a smiley emoticon). “So let’s have dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Dinner would be nice; we’ll go Dutch, which will be another nationality brought into the equation.”

  “Sorry,” he messaged back, “Dutch? What do you mean?”

  “It’s an expression,” I assured him. “It means I’ll pay half.”

  “Oh God,” he said. “You’re not going to insist on paying half, are you?”