by Stella Grey
I’d written to him, a long email. I’d made a copy of the message in case he wrote back, and read it again now. It was a warm letter that he hadn’t bothered to reply to. This had all happened well over a year ago. I remembered him now. I remembered the excitement, when I found him, the proper astonishing exhilaration of it: the instant attraction to the smiling face, the attraction to the warm and hopeful profile statement that invited contact. Here was an ideal man, I’d thought, who lived literally down the road, a man I thought I might like, and who might like me. I’d tried twice to get in touch with him, and then I’d sent a follow-up note, and he’d completely ignored all three attempts. So—now I went back online, back to the same site, and did a fresh search, using the same profile name he’d used then (which wasn’t anything like his real name). He was still active there, and he’d posted new, better photographs of himself. He didn’t just look like Andrew; it was Andrew. Andrew was one of the men I’d written to and who hadn’t replied. He hadn’t even been able to bring himself to say “Thank you for that—you seem lovely but I don’t think we’re compatible,” which is all it really takes. REALLY. It’s all that it takes. He was one of the rude men who couldn’t even be arsed to be kind, and I hadn’t realized, all the time that I was talking to him in the coffee shop, all those hours.
Which brings us to Lesson Seven: often, people have fixed ideas about what they want, and it won’t matter how nice you are. Try not to take this personally. The situation is rather like directors casting a film. It doesn’t mean you’re not a good actor, if you don’t fit their preconceived brief. All it means is that you don’t fit their preconceived brief.
The news that was at first grim began to seem funny. The next time I saw him at the café, I said, “Here’s something that’ll make you laugh: I’ve just realized that we’re on the same dating site and that I messaged you once, a long time ago.” Oh really, he said, his eyes betraying that he was instantly on alert. What was I going to say next? “Yes!” I said. “I messaged you and you didn’t even reply to me; how hilarious is that?” He didn’t look as if it was remotely hilarious. “How’s it going?” I asked him. “On the dating site, I mean.”
“It’s going fine,” he said grimly.
I don’t know you at all, do I, Andrew? I thought. I’m not sure I’d know you even if I knew you for a very long time.
Sometimes we realize afterwards that we dodged a bullet, and sometimes the bullet’s a big man-shaped one.
I asked Bill if he’d like to talk on the phone. This was fairly radical for me. I’m on the record as a phone-disliker; I’m easily flustered when nervous, and (though this might be hard to believe) I’m naturally shy, and the phone fills me with dread, always has. But Bill was easy to talk to. Bill filled in my own awkward silences with self-confident, tangential chat, and made it seem easy. He said that he thought we should meet. He thought a distance relationship might work. “After all,” he said, “there are trains. After all, there is phone sex.”
After having that conversation, I began one with myself about what I really wanted. We all make assumptions about our own needs, and it’s good to interrogate them, once in a while. Bill’s list of the joys of a distance relationship (he’d had one before) was quite persuasive. There was the (theoretical) romance of train travel in the mix, the anticipatory pleasure involved in whizzing along the backbone of England on a Friday night towards an escapist weekend in your lover’s arms. There was the not seeing each other much thing, because according to Bill anticipating is exciting (it works well with Christmas). No supermarket runs would be involved in the relationship. There was also the fact that we were both ridiculously busy and independent and might not want someone else to have to relate to all the time, and to bend our lives around day to day, and to negotiate with 24/7.
You see, in the mouth of a man of lesser appeal, lacking Bill’s blunt northern charm, that list could look quite selfish. He was selling it to both of us as a lifestyle choice, but what he might really be saying was: I am not good at sharing, I’m set in my ways, I am not prepared to defend all the live sports I go to, and the many beers I have afterwards, and actually what I need is a bit on the side.
Even apart from that possibility, I wasn’t sure about an arrangement that skimmed all the cream and custard out of the trifle and left the stale cake behind. What kind of a connection would that be, fundamentally? It made me think hard about relationships and what’s vital about them. We’re often told—not least in the constant drone of the mass media—that it’s love that matters, that it’s the spark that counts in sexual dalliances, and that there are ways of keeping the sparky element alive under domestic duress, so that we can all have the sort of love lives that mimic the train-based one (romantic, anticipated, fresh). Is that really ingredient X, though? Or is it something else? These questions are highly personal. We all like different ratios of stuff in our muesli. Personally I’m big on that dried chewy pineapple that no doubt leads to pretty instant dental caries.
So, having considered Bill’s well-honed, well-practiced propaganda, I realized that the one thing that was missing from it and that he delighted in having excluded, was one that I might value: the domestic life. I missed being partnered up like two little water rats, cozily just above the water line. I missed the day-to-day things Bill didn’t: supermarket conversations, having someone there at night to tell about my day, snuggled up watching box sets together, with wine (the worst cliché there is, in dating site terms); and I missed the fact that when you’re contentedly paired up and living with someone, sex isn’t so performance-oriented. I had a subsidiary fear that the alternate-weekends plan he described—seeing each other twice a month; each of us traveling once a month—was going to bring high expectations with it. In my (admittedly incomplete) survey of middle-aged British men, they’d lined up in two basic groups: those who were tired, like me, and wanted fulfilling but unpressured, non-try-hard intimacy, and those who’d been watching a lot of porn and were all revved up for a woman as unlike their middle-aged ex-wife as it was possible to find; men who were highly focused on depilated nights of marathon hot shagging. It was possible that Bill was among those who inhabited camp B, I realized.
It was with Bill that I had my first phone sex experience. (Don’t judge me.) It was okay. I mean, it works, it really does: it really is possible to heat someone up to explosion just with soft words and unexpectedly frank but poetic descriptions of what’s happening—I might actually be a phone sex goddess—and to be heated up, in turn, by the other person’s being so heated up, and to find that you come like a train, but . . . it’s like eating a lot of the chewy dried pineapple. Gorgeous, trippy, a sugar high, but there’s a bit of a comedown afterwards. There was no one’s hairy chest to rest my head upon, no heartbeat. And that’s what I missed. That’s what I really, really missed.
When we had phone sex a second time, I wondered if it was going to feel just the same, and it did, and that was the problem. It was exactly the same. It felt like it might be exactly the same forevermore. Having nothing to do with anything tangible, it could be re-created over and over in exactly the same prompted, cued and processed way. Fundamentally, it wasn’t anything like an authentic event. All it had anything to do with was the achievement of an orgasm that could just as easily have been manufactured by a machine. Cybersex is a better name than it intends to be, because of its sci-fi associations. There’s more than a whiff of the robotic about it. It travels from one brain and one nervous system to another, down an interplay of wiring, both human and technological, bypassing the world and its happenings entirely. It exists out of time: it has no past, no future and no present tense. It’s a fiction, one we step aside from our lives into. In the case of Bill and me, it was all about our both being lonely. We were not only the substitute people for one another, but substitutes for the substitute people. I felt virtually romantic about these limitations.
Once we were having phone sex, I became less and less sure that Bill still wan
ted to meet. When I tried to take him up on the meeting-halfway idea, there were always issues: he had his son and couldn’t; or he had a work deadline; or he had a cold. I had a long non-sexual phone conversation with him one weekend—he seemed an intelligent man, sardonic, sane, sensible—and asked about his previous distance relationship. He and she had love-commuted for a while, and saw each other twice a month, just as he’d suggested we might do. “Right—so what brought it to an end?” I asked him.
“Distance killed it,” he said. “The end of the relationship was mostly down to the distance.”
“That being the case, I don’t know why you’re even bothering to talk to me,” I said (though I had more than an inkling).
“Just because that attempt failed doesn’t mean all attempts would,” he argued.
“But you said it was distance,” I reminded him, “and we can’t do anything about the distance; I’m embedded here, for work and family reasons, and you’re embedded there, to be close to your son.”
“I know,” he said, “you’re right, you’re right.”
“Why make things so difficult for yourself?” I continued. “There must be lots of women in your own city.”
“I’m probably on the phone for the same reason you are,” he said. “I’m casting the net wider.”
I got a sweet, funny email from him later that evening. He was an attractive man, in many ways. But 200 miles away. I didn’t think I could even embark on it. I was having trouble believing in it.
But our erotic phone connection continued. Bill rang one evening and said he was a little drunk. He’d texted earlier asking what I was doing, and I’d told him I was reading on the sofa. I was feeling a little low, and I’d drunk a whole bottle of red wine, having started at 4 p.m. When he rang I was making a Spanish omelette. The conversation proceeded like this.
“I’ve been thinking about your sofa,” he said. “One of my favourite post-coital moments is reading aloud to one another. You like?”
“I do like. What else do you like?”
“Other things. Don’t get me going. You’ll regret it. I’m thinking about running my tongue along the inside of your very long legs. And then . . .”
“And then . . . ?”
“Nibbling the inside contours of your thighs, and then . . .”
“Oh God. I’m trying to chop garlic here.”
“I’m standing behind you and spreading your legs. Don’t mind me, carry on. I’ve lifted your skirt and I’m squatting down to kiss you through your underwear, and then . . .”
“Can’t cut straight.”
“You know, I could just get on a train. Just say the word.”
I turned off the gas and drank the dregs from the glass, and sat in the kitchen staring out of the window, unsure what to do. I’d already had a conversation with someone who’d had a distance relationship. It was a disaster, she told me. They got themselves into a spiral of suspicion. They’d made themselves unhappy imagining the other being unfaithful, and then that suspicion began to cloud the actual meetings, and after that it was hopeless: the whole thing had imploded.
I saw Andrew the following morning. He came and sat at the table with me. “Hello, stranger,” he said. “So how are you?” I told him I was wondering whether to say yes to a date with a man who lives far away. “You should,” he said, “you should—it’d be good for you.”
How easy it was for him to be my buddy and advise me to see other men; it was crushing, even now, after all hope of him had ended. I asked what he’d been up to. I began to notice that as we talked he was glancing repetitively over my shoulder. There was, from somewhere behind me, the sound of someone getting up from a table, a chair being pushed back, and then a slim blond woman of thirty or so, in skinny jeans and heeled boots, walked past me and into my eyeline. Andrew’s eyes followed her; they followed her into the bathroom before returning to me. A few minutes later, as another young woman got up to leave, he appraised her rear view as he was talking. He was multi-tasking. I went to get more coffee, and watched as he scanned the room. Another young woman had her rump evaluated as she went to join the queue I was standing in. I’m fairly confident in telling you that Andrew’s an arse man.
Right, I thought, it’s now or never. When I returned to my seat I asked him if he was dating. Not really, he said. Are you hoping for someone young? I asked him. Our eyes met and he considered his answer. Well, I’ve decided that I want children, he said, and so it ought to be someone young-ish. You should have children, I said; it’d be good for you. It’s tricky, though, he continued—appraising the blond woman again as she passed—because most of the thirty-year-olds I chat up in here think of me as elderly, at fifty-five. That is tricky, I said. It wasn’t that I was surprised, because why shouldn’t a man of fifty-five have a word with himself about last chances to be a father? I have complete respect for that. But this was someone I’d had long, long, intensely personal conversations with, over weeks and weeks. We’d done a course in one another; we knew one another. We’d covered hopes and fears and dreams and nightmares and he hadn’t mentioned once, in all those hours and hours of talking, that he wanted children.
On the other hand—really, why would he? Our intimacy had been something huge for me, but was something routine for him. I’ve seen him in operation many times since, sitting with his laptop open, not working, talking nineteen to the dozen to a woman at the next table, leaning towards her and gesticulating with his hands, in full flow. It was possible she’d become rapidly infatuated, that she’d go home and write in her diary, as I did: This is it, I’ve found him, it’s happened at last. He likes to talk to women. He likes women who have something to say and can argue a case. That’s basically all it was about, with the two of us, all those weeks I was obsessed with him. He wasn’t infatuated. He was socializing and practicing work avoidance. I wasn’t someone he’d found after a long search for compatibility—I was just a part of his coffee-time clique.
“You should mention on your online profile that you want kids,” I told him, when his attention returned.
He shook his head. “That might look desperate,” he said. “And I don’t want to scare anybody.”
“What was it you did that you feel bad about?” I asked him. “You said once when we talked that you’re not a good person.”
“There’s a list,” he said. “I won’t bore you with it.”
“I hope when you find your thirty-year-old that you bore her with it, the complete list, before you marry her,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, looking me in the eye at last. “Do you really want to know?” He warned me he was going to shock me. “I jilted someone once, when I was young,” he said. “At the altar. Changed my mind.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Oh GOD. Tell me you didn’t. You don’t mean at the actual altar, on the day?”
“I’m not going to do that again,” Andrew said, “and so I need to be 200 percent sure.”
Later that day, Bill rang again. Look, I think we really have to meet, he said. Let’s just meet. I think I’d be nervous, I told him—but when were you thinking? Tomorrow, he said; let’s seize the day, I’ll come to you. I can’t do that, I said, because I have a friend staying and we’re going to the cinema. Oh, well, never mind, he said; another time. I don’t really have a friend staying, I confessed, but I feel nervous about meeting you and having real sex. Has to happen some time, he said; we can’t just have phone sex for the rest of our lives. I do this, I told him; this is what I do, I defer—and then people lose interest; we talk ourselves to death and then they lose interest in me. I’m not losing interest, he said, but we can’t continue like this. I know, I told him, but do you really, really want a distance relationship? It didn’t work before, remember, when you tried it before. I know, he said; it isn’t ideal.
I spent the evening trawling through more bold statements by men who’d declared themselves available. There seemed to be a theme emerging. “I’m not prepared to go to a supermarket on a Saturday
anymore.” “A woman must be able to grasp that I am a free spirit with my own life.” “Feminine woman wanted, who understands that a man is an imperfect being, who needs to see his friends and to watch sport.” “Beautiful woman wanted for urban life of hedonistic pleasure; the time for DIY, children and animals is over.” Researchers of the male midlife crisis should look no further.
Meanwhile four new approaches had arrived in my dating site mailboxes. None of them had really tailored their messages so as to start a human conversation.
1.“I’d be good for you, I promise, here’s my mobile number.”
2.“Here’s my email address, tell me all about yourself and what you like in bed.”
3.“How about it babe, love ur sexy pix.”
4.“Tell me what u r doing right now. George xxxxx”
George hadn’t answered most of the profile-page questionnaire. Answering the question “What makes you unique?” George had written: “Wot makes me unique? My DNA. LOL LOL.” George, to whom I had never spoken, with whom I’d had no contact before, wanted to know what I was doing right now, and attached five kisses. Get a grip, George. It might take a little more effort, finding the love of your life. You can’t order women like chicken.
I was feeling low again. I’d been trolled on dating sites several times that week, by mean-hearted men who enjoyed taking a brave anonymous punch at a sad middle-aged woman who had the temerity to need love. I’d got myself into an email cycle with a nice-seeming man of thirty-six, who wooed me for forty-eight hours, drew out all sorts of personal details and confessions, asked for my real name, Googled me, and then wrote me a one-line message that said: “I have looked you up and I’ve seen your pictures, and I hate to be rude but I won’t be doing that again, I can assure you.” What was most obvious was that he really didn’t hate to be rude.
The week after this, I went away for the weekend to a coastal village with my friend Anna, who is also a divorced midlifer. We were going to do a lot of walking and spend our time reading. In the end we did a bit of walking and spent our time eating, touring quirky shops looking for presents (mostly for ourselves), and reading newspapers in the pub. Anna liked to hear about my romantic encounters in gory detail. She’d never done online dating. She hadn’t needed to. She fell in love with a male friend who was also divorced, and her love was reciprocated, and she made it all seem so damned simple.