Mid-Life Ex-Wife

by Stella Grey

  So now, in the second spring, there was another reader of manuals who wanted to try out his lioness taming on me. “Does it ever occur to you, Todd,” I said, when we were discussing his pickup artistry, “that there’s a fundamental irony at the heart of these women-handling techniques?”

  “How so?” he said.

  “It seems to me that a lot of the men who say that all they want is sexual access are playing out some other drama, and what they really want is to be loved unconditionally. If finding a woman to love is the goal, dehumanizing her into a target so as to make her love you is beyond ironic: it makes ‘love’ into a meaningless word.”

  “Look at you, trying to dominate me.”

  “Are men really threatened that much by our being self-determining? I saw advice being dished out that men should avoid women on dating sites who use words like ‘independent,’ ‘strong’ or ‘ambitious.’ ”

  “Sounds sensible to me.”

  “Isn’t it kind of ironic that the umbrella subject of all this talk is affection, but uses such hostile language?”

  “Whatever,” Todd told me.

  “One last thing, Todd,” I said. “The woman in question might be holding your hand when you die, but seems to me it’s quite likely that she’d also be the one who put the poison in your soup.”

  Whenever I came up against these men I felt shaken afterwards: it was like coming across a Nazi. I know that sounds extreme, but I’d read enough to know that they’re extreme people whose heads have been filled with dangerous ideology. I had to take deep breaths and remind myself that they were in the minority. I counted all the lovely men I knew, who would be horrified by this dehumanizing objectifying crap, and all the friends of those friends and relations, and all the men in the networks of those friends, who would also be horrified, and managed to stop hyperventilating. Fascinating though it was, I had to prevent myself from doing any more reading of manosphere forums and blogs, because my adrenal gland was becoming over-tired.

  I talked to Todd once more that week, and then I stopped talking to Todd. Evidently he’d gone for some sort of top-up vampire serum, or suchlike, because he came roaring back in flames of dickhead righteousness, and started calling me Princess, and asked me if I had a cat.

  Thankfully a powerful vaccination was at hand. Things perked up tremendously when I got into conversation with a very different sort of an American. Cliff. Cliff found my raising the subject of the manosphere and pickup artistry galvanizing. It had been a huge media topic in the US, he said. The so-called philosophy had trickled into academia. People were doing PhDs on it. He thought Strauss had written his book as a satire, though many of his fellow Americans weren’t habituated to irony, he added.

  Cliff and I started talking and chatted on and off for a month. Cliff was very good medicine after the woman-haters. We had the kind of instant rapport you might develop with someone at a drinks reception: you monopolize each other for a while, and talk and talk, and you’re just on the point of saying you should swap numbers and meet again, because you’re convinced you’ve just made a new friend, when the other person says they have to go and they leave without a backward glance—because they have these sorts of conversations at parties all the time. This is their normal, though it isn’t yours. That’s what happened with Cliff, who lived in California, and with Paul, a man of a broadly similar type, who lived in New Mexico. I was the one who instigated contact with both of them, having decided that I needed to get out of the closed circuit I was locked into.

  I’m not going to claim that American men are more dynamic and interesting than British men. I have insufficient data, by a mile. But I have to tell you that whenever I needed cheering up, I’d go and search in the American part of whatever dating website I was surfing. Usually I was cheered enormously. There was something on offer, in the US listings, that I wasn’t finding at home: intellectual curiosity and a seize-the-day attitude coupled with a willingness to chat. There was time set aside to chat to me, purely on a pen-pal basis; perhaps the knowledge that we’d never meet made this easy. There was never any pressure or expectation. After a month of intermittent emailing, Cliff and Paul both treated me like their pals. In both cases their friendliness extended to invitations to go and stay, to be shown around campuses and taken to the coast. Cliff gave me his address and said if I was ever in Santa Monica . . . and for five full minutes I seriously considered buying a plane ticket.

  What stood out about both of them was the energy with which they attacked life. Beyond the working day, the routine social pattern, there was language learning and traveling; sidelines, projects and charities. They’d undergone therapy and knew themselves pretty well, or at least could talk as if they did; there was self-imagining and self-improvement. All of which stood out starkly against the average British male’s profile clichés (box sets, sofas, wine, walks, pubs, beaches, sport). Don’t get me wrong: I don’t practice California levels of dynamism, either, but you see that was precisely the point. At a time at which life cried out to be reinvented, becoming the girlfriend/life partner/buddy of a man who treats each day as if it might be his last, a man truly alive in all senses, was beyond attractive. For a while it virtually became a craving. I yearned, for a time, to be an outsider absorbed into another culture. I yearned for sunshine, literal and metaphorical.

  Disillusioned by the sheer number of British men who had no wish to know me, I decided that it might as well be an international search. I was prone to the full Atlantic merger fantasy: a green card, legal alien status, and then a marriage to an eccentric, articulate loving man with a great accent: all this flashed up in my head before I’d even ticked the box. I wrote to some Norwegians, too. I had an idea that Scandinavians might be taller than average, quirky, congenially serene, bohemian and unmaterialistic. So it goes, so it went, in the personal racial mythology of one woman’s head. I found lots of alluring, interestingly dressed, well-read, well-traveled fifty-five-year-olds with Nordic cheekbones that I could project a two-nationality UK-Scandi fantasy happily onto. I also wrote to some Germans and Finns. I wasted three hours one night tracking down romantic second husbands from among the northern races, and writing them charming notes that were never replied to.

  Paul and Cliff both knew how to write a profile, aside from anything. They were cool. They knew their way around a bookshop and listed unexpected genres of interest, and talked with real enthusiasm about them. The conjunction of high and low culture was refreshing. Cliff played a musical instrument and wrote songs, meditated and practiced martial arts, climbed, horse-rode, cycled, swam, ran marathons, cooked to relax, mentored other people: he seemed to be living three lives at once.

  But then I noticed other details. Paul said he thought life was a process of constant recalibration. He saw himself as an identity in progress, a soul in transition, a personality that was still in flux. He’d done the work on himself and was continuing with it. A voice in my head told me that people who are so driven might not be tolerant of those less so. These men might be the male dating equivalent of Tiger Mothers. They might prove to be Tiger Boyfriends, forever cracking the whip for their partner’s better time management. Nor might hyper self-awareness always be a good thing. It might be exhausting, living with one of these dynamos. Their expectation of high achieving might turn swiftly into critique of the person sitting next to them. Perhaps that’s why they were divorced.

  Mike, a third American candidate, proved to have the supernova of all wish lists. The woman of his dreams, meticulously described, was to be tall but not a giraffe. She was to be elegant but not label-fixated. She was to be groomed but not beauty-parlor-oriented. She was to read like a whirling dervish and teach him something new every day. She ought to be able to discuss theology and theoretical physics with equal levels of competence and zeal. She ought to have read the following (list) and she had to like the same movies (another list). It went on and on. His idea of compatibility was that the other person would be identical to him other than f
or gender. I’m still curious as to whether the two or three women in the whole USA who fitted the bill exactly got in touch with him, or whether he’s still out there, batting away inquiries from people who haven’t got the right level of chat about Being and Nothingness. (Me for instance.)

  In practice, the relationship I’d had idle fantasies about would probably have lasted as far as the first weekend. All three of the men were teetotalers, and I’m fairly sure they’d have viewed the average Friday night alcohol intake of a northern European as pathological. Cliff especially, who would have fitted well into the Victorian temperance movement. I chalked this up as a negative and then I thought to myself: Why are you even having this interior monologue about a man in Santa Monica? This is utterly time-wasting and idiotic. Stop it, I instructed myself sternly. So I did. Both Cliff and Paul were losing interest in chatting, having both started dating, and the contact came to a natural halt.

  I was a little bit sad about Cliff. I’d become really fond of him. It was a little bit sad not to get his slightly manic, funny messages in my inbox anymore, but I was cheered up, in fact made slightly hysterical, by an episode the day after, involving mobile phones. Technically, probably a dozen men have my mobile number (it might be a lot more; I am slightly afraid of making a list), though as I write this, none have been in touch since we parted—or since things ended without ever getting going. On this particular night, the weekend after slapping my own wrist in response to my American-man addiction, I got a text from an unknown number. The number was unknown but the sender, clearly, was known to me already. “Just got new phone,” it read. “Can we talk again tonight?”

  Now, I had no idea who this was, but it was almost certainly one of the two men I’d been talking to in the last week. Both of the phone conversations, with Greg and with Rich, had been fairly brief. I was guessing it was one of those two, but which? I couldn’t respond with “Who is this?” because the natural reply to that would be “What do you mean who is this? Just how many men are you talking to?”

  So instead I said, “Hi! Have you had a good day?”

  The trouble was, now I was kind of pretending I knew who it was. Or I would have asked. And I hadn’t.

  “Pretty good,” the reply buzzed back. “Went swimming after work and felt much more relaxed afterwards.”

  Aha! I knew that Greg had been planning to start swimming after work. It was Greg. “Can I call now to talk about the date?” he added in a follow-up text.

  “Yes, do,” I replied.

  The phone rang and I answered it. “Greg, hi, hello, how are you this evening?” I said confidently.

  The voice on the other end said, “Who’s Greg?”

  In the end I didn’t meet either of them. Rich was too offended that I’d called him Greg. Greg emailed to say that he had to address some long-standing issues about his sexuality, so I was kind of relieved he was bailing on me. Even though he was American.

  Landings on Islands

  SUMMER, YEAR TWO

  I came across Martin when I did because of an idiot. I don’t know why it is that men not interested in a woman would think to write to her to tell her so—it must be about power, of some sort, mustn’t it? I received these rejection slips every now and then. The one that sticks in my mind simply said: “Not my type, sorry.” (I hadn’t approached him, nor seen him on the site, and had absolutely no idea who he was.)

  On this occasion the message said: “Just wanted to tell you that while you look lovely, I’m looking for someone younger.” He was fifty-five and his profile stated that he wanted someone “under thirty-five, preferably twenty-four–twenty-nine,” so I asked what he was doing straying into the geriatric-females area of the site. “I was trying to compliment you,” he wrote. He’d been divorced for a year, having left his wife “when she became overweight and argumentative.” He’d spent his whole working life supporting her and their children, he argued, and now he deserved a young woman, one who was firm-breasted, flat-bellied and tight. But what about compatibility? I asked; what about going into old age with someone? He didn’t plan to retire for another twenty years, he said. He was young and vital. “As for having things in common, if she’s young enough, she can learn.”

  After this I craved a conversation with a regular human. Having exhausted the local lineup of men (we’d exhausted each other, in fact), I cast my net wider. Generally I stuck to a circle drawn around the accessible hinterland of my own city limits, of about an hour’s travel, so that dating in a casual way was possible. Distance makes this difficult; a trip to the cinema is loaded with expectation when you’ve had to travel far to get there. I knew this, but I couldn’t help myself. I extended and extended until I blundered into the catchments of other cities, and saw a whole new row of faces. There was one among them I was immediately attracted to. Not the handsome tanned one, nor the actor, nor the floppy-haired Peter Pan type: none of those. The potato-faced one, the teacher with the ridiculous goatee and twinkly eyes: that was the one. Martin. I went to his profile and experienced one of those immediate recognitions, the sort that tells us that someone newly met is already a friend. He’d written a funny essay about his life, breaking it down into categories (hairstyles I have been pictured with; music phases I have gone through, and so on). “No expectations of who I’ll meet, what they’ll be like; no checklist,” he’d also written. I sent a one-word message: “Hello.” Martin’s online green light wasn’t lit, but as I watched, I saw it light up. He’d received an alert to say mail was waiting, and in turn I got a notification saying he’d visited my profile.

  Shortly after this a message arrived in my inbox. “Hello! How very nice to hear from you. I see we have almost spooky similarities, and what’s a hundred miles between friends? How’s the weather looking, where you are? I’ve been trying fruitlessly to fix my car, which has been going URUGUGURUG when I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t. I was so excited to get a message that I probably have oil on my phone.”

  I asked Martin if it was really that rare, receiving a message. I got lots, I told him, though most were variants on “ ’Ello darlin’, fancy a shag?”

  “I’ve only been here a month,” he said, “and none of the women who’ve contacted me have appealed. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant. But there’s got to be basic shared language, don’t you think? I’m not here just for the shags. I want a life partner. I hope that doesn’t put you off. Might be bad to mention wanting a life partner in the second message.”

  When he reached his laptop the conversation continued for most of the evening. He was bright and lively; it was like standing with a glass of warm white wine at a dull party and suddenly finding someone entertaining to talk to. It was rather like chatting to Cliff the American had been, in fact. When I logged off I copied Martin’s profile page to my laptop and spent a while looking at it. I zoomed in on his potato head, slightly piggy eyes and squashy nose, and began to feel vaguely proprietorial about them. Just before logging off I got a message from another man, that said: “You look young for your age; can I see some pictures of your body now, to see if you’re young all over?” Sometimes an invisible hand comes out of the internet and paws at you. I got Martin’s page up again, and looked at it, and immediately began to feel better.

  The next morning, at just after 6:30, Martin messaged again. “Really early, in a rush, as I’m teaching at a summer school for most of the holidays, and I’m going for a run first, but just wanted to say, what a delight to meet you last night. Very much looking forward to talking more. See you at the usual place at around 8 p.m.? If you’re free that is. If you’re not out on a date with some young hunk.”

  “Date? What’s that?” I asked him. “Hereabouts it’s a Middle Eastern fruit eaten at Christmas. I’ll see you around 8 p.m. at the usual virtual corner. Wait, this does sound like a date.”

  “It is, it is,” he wrote. “I’m claiming you this evening. Accept no other offers!”

  I looked at his page again. It was a deft summing-up of a p
erson, of Martin’s mental landscape; it gave full rein to self-promotion, and then knocked that idealized man down with a satirical second voice, as if recording his own inner reaction to it. I’d seen this attempted once before, and in that case it had come across merely as bragging. A key consideration when writing an online profile—and one of the easiest things to get wrong—is tone, and Martin’s tone was just right. It made me want to tear up my own page and begin afresh. I really liked the look of him, too, in his pictures: forty-four years old, sturdy, tall, with a receding hairline, he was a man unafraid to rock a checked shirt and brown cords, and his smile was mischievous. Barely half an hour after getting going with the day, I had to stop and look at his profile again. My eye ran down the questionnaire part of the page, and it was then that I saw something I hadn’t registered before. In answer to the question, “Do you want children?” he’d written, “Undecided.” I hadn’t taken that in, in previous readings. I messaged him. “Just noticed you are undecided about children. I’m past that point. If children are a maybe we’d better say cheerio, I think.”

  His reply said: “At work but just had to say, not an issue, I promise you. I tend to the No more than the Maybe.” At 4:30 p.m. there was a follow-up. “The point is it’d be No if my partner/wife was also a No, and Yes if she was a Yes. It’d be up to her. Left to myself I’d happily be a No.”

  That evening we talked on screen again. Afterwards there was a message at 1 a.m., another at 6 a.m., then two at lunchtime. The following evening, emboldened by our growing rapport, we swapped real-world identities and email addresses, and Googled each other, and tried out comedy on one another, going into our stand-up routines about our failings—which is actually a useful way of airing some of the cons, to balance out the relentless pros of your online listing. By now it was clear we were hugely compatible. But, as I was learning, email compatibility isn’t something anyone should rely on. At least, I should have been learning that.