by Stella Grey
“There’s something in your eyes,” he said huskily. “I want to meet you and ask you two questions.”
“What are the two questions?” I asked him. He wouldn’t tell me. He said he had to go, and rang off. Then he messaged me asking if he’d passed the test. What test is that? I asked him. “I have no idea what’s happening here,” I told my new dog, who grunted and rolled over. The new dog was commendably lazy and this suited me fine.
After this I went out food shopping. As I was walking back my mobile rang and Lucas’s name appeared on the screen. When I said hello a screechy and irate female voice told me that it was Lucas’s wife. I didn’t quite grasp, at first, who this was. “Who?” I asked. “I’m sorry, who?”
“Lucas, you know who Lucas is, I’m sure,” she shouted. “He’s the one who’s been sending you pictures of his dick.”
Lucas’s wife rang twice more, in the following two days, to rant at me. It turned out they still lived together. She wasn’t interested in my “story” that he was on a dating site, nor that he’d said he was separated. He’d sent me explicit pictures and that was evidence enough of my guilt. Evidently I was some sort of hussy, preying on her husband. I don’t know if it really got through to her that it wasn’t like that, and that he’d signaled, very loudly and clearly, that he wanted out of the relationship. The next time she rang I pressed the red button as soon as I heard her voice. Then I blocked the number. After that the emails began arriving, warning me to stay away from her man. I’m more than happy to, I said, in my five-word replies.
James rang again, suggesting lunch. “Meanwhile,” he added, “can you tell me why you’re divorced—did you have an affair?” No, I said. “Did you lose interest in sex?” he asked. No, I told him. “Did you rack up huge debts,” he asked, “and are you a mean menopausal nag?” This wasn’t encouraging. “My wife was sexually dull,” he added, “are you the same?”
“Perhaps you bored her,” I countered. “Do you watch a lot of porn?”
“Of course, of course,” he admitted.
“Perhaps you had performance-related aspirations that turned her off,” I suggested. “Perhaps your lovemaking became unaffectionate.”
He didn’t get it. “Let’s have lunch,” he said, “and spar a little more; I’m feeling quite turned on by your argumentative side.”
I told him that I didn’t want to.
He didn’t take this well. “I’m not stupid, you know,” he said irritably. “Just because I left school at sixteen doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
(Here we go, I thought: here’s the trap that the pleb comment was supposed to set, a trap I was now being treated as if I’d fallen into.) “Of course it doesn’t mean you’re stupid; why would that mean you were stupid?” I said, becoming offended.
“I probably know more than you about Italian food and modernist architecture,” he said, “and I probably speak better French—how’s your French?” He started speaking in French, and I replied, haltingly. He told me that my grammar was rubbish, which was true. I told him that I had to go. “Oh, you have to go,” he said dubiously. “Somewhere urgent to be?”
“Yes, urgent soup-making to do,” I told him. “Very, very urgent. Bye.”
The next morning he called again, wanting to know if I was a rich woman looking for a gigolo. I wish, I said. “You don’t have money, then?” he queried. “Because you sound like you have money.” (Presumably it was the lack of an accent, again, that was to blame.)
“I don’t have much money at all,” I admitted. “I chose a path that only just keeps the wolf from the door.” That’s a pity, he said. He told me he was having to sell up and rent somewhere, as part of the divorce. “I sympathize,” I told him. “I’ve been there—it’s physically shocking when everything gets divided up and half of your life disappears.”
James told me that he could tell I had a fantastic body and that I’d be fantastic in bed. Christ, how I hate this kind of schmoozing. He didn’t think that at all. He was just trying to score. I was steadily becoming pissed off. “Hold on, hold on there,” I hectored him. “You’re making quite a leap here; why would my body be fantastic? That doesn’t follow from what we’ve been talking about, and no, since you ask, I don’t have a fantastic body, by anyone’s reckoning; you can see my pictures on the website.” I was openly irritated now. “Don’t go telling me I’d be fantastic in bed, either,” I told him. “I’m not interested in having sex that’s evaluated, nor in having my physical self rated, not by you or by anyone. Sorry.”
“Aw, come on,” he said, “I bet we’d hit it off, I’m the best kisser you’ll ever meet, and I have other skills that’ll make you dizzy.”
“I’m not sure I want to be dizzy,” I told him. Still he insisted that we meet. I don’t want to meet you, I told him, and I have to work, so I’m going to have to say goodbye.
“There are so many women with heavy baggage out there,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much baggage there is, how many sad stories I’ve had to listen to; I went to bed with a woman six times and every time it turned into a whole saga about her ex-husband—they pour their little hearts out, these women—but you’re not like that are you, you haven’t mentioned your ex once.”
“I have my baggage, believe me,” I told him, “and it’s unrealistic to expect people who’ve lived half a century to be able to discard the past completely.”
“But that’s exactly what we need to do,” he said. “That’s why I left my wife.”
I had a last message from Lars, an unexpected one. “You’re not going to believe this,” he wrote, “but I’m in love. I met a girl in a bar, and fell for her, and we’re seeing a lot of each other.” I said that was marvelous, I was thrilled for him. His reply to this surprised me. “Can we still meet and have sex some time?” What? No, I told him, no we can’t, and hang on a minute there, I thought you were in love. I am, I am, he insisted, and I’m about to mute my profile (he wasn’t deleting it entirely, just in case it didn’t work out). “I still want to have sex with you,” he said. “I still imagine it.”
“Please don’t cheat on her, this lovely girl,” I wrote. “Be faithful. You’ll feel good about yourself.”
“You’re right,” he replied. “So, let me know if you change your mind.”
I went back online a few days later feeling lower than I had for a long time. A message was waiting. “Hi I saw ur profile, thought was gr8, let’s meet, I have a GSOH, work hard and play hard, that’s my motto, keep fit. I like most things, love to cuddle up on the sofa with a DVD and a bottle of wine, if you want to know more just ask me, now tell me all about you.”
You need to stop this now, my inner voice said. Something in me that had been holding on tight relaxed and gave way. Clenched stubborn hopes gave way. Determination loosened its grip on me. I’ve had enough of this, I thought. Enough. Why am I doing this to myself?
The Day I Decided to Quit
WINTER, YEAR TWO
I decided that I’d cancel my memberships at the rate of one a week, starting with one I rarely went to, the fee-free site that had proved to be full of fuckwits of various sorts. I couldn’t remember its password, but found it eventually, written in a list on a laptop document I’d made at the beginning. I’d added other passwords as I’d gone along. All the passwords were here and there were fourteen of them. I’d joined (and in some cases unjoined, and in some cases unjoined and rejoined) a total of fourteen dating sites.
So, I found the password and logged on, and went through the whole rigmarole of convincing the site that I wanted to leave it (they don’t usually make this easy). The inner voice said, Just one more look before you go. There on the first page, lined up in the row with all the faces I’d seen before, was a new one, a serious face, looking out pleasantly but seriously from among the grinners, the poseurs, the scowlers, the uber-filtered, the intentionally blurry, the sunglasses-wearers, the boys-night-out shots, the wanted posters, the naked-chested, the pictures taken beside cars and at off
ice parties and while barbecuing and at weddings, and scuba diving and on Ben Nevis.
His name was Edward. He had a long symmetrical face, and sad intelligent eyes. He was a very tall man (six foot five apparently) pictured in a checked shirt and a gray V-neck jumper. The photograph wasn’t flattering—it was flattened out and a little bit jaundiced, like a bad passport snap. Edward lived in the next neighborhood to mine, though, and he’d written a short but appealing autobiography in the space provided. He was a scientist interested in physics and the cosmos, history and culture, as well as Doctor Who, action thrillers, hills, cycling, beer, cooking, weekends away, the south of France . . . I decided to message him. “You’re way too normal to be here,” I wrote. “Did you get lost on your way somewhere else?”
A little later he replied. “I could say just the same about you. Shall we meet?”
Then he visited my profile four times. I knew this as the visits were chalked up by the site and communicated to me via exuberant emails. Good news, Stella Grey: someone just had a look at you! (Oh yippee, I had taken to saying to the screen sarcastically.) The first time he looked was immediately after I got in touch. Then, half an hour later, he looked a second time. That evening there was a third visit, and after midnight a fourth. “Oh, so here you are again, Edward,” I said, when I got the final exuberant alert. “What are you looking at?” I asked the screen. The fact that he’d looked four times made me want to look myself, attempting objective fresh eyes. What was he seeing there? Did I do myself justice? Had something put him off, so that he had to return, to decide whether the positives outweighed the downsides? Or was it—as had happened to me, more than once—that he’d had an experience of recognition, and he was excited and couldn’t resist revisiting? The evidence, I’m afraid to say, pointed to (a). I’d replied enthusiastically to his suggestion that we meet, perhaps too enthusiastically. (You see? Online dating had filled me with self-doubt.) As yet there had been no reply. Only silence had resulted from the Edward direction. As I waited over several days, the silence grew noisy. I forced myself not to write a second time, and waited.
As I’ve already mentioned, writing a really good profile is difficult, without being dull and generic, or sounding as if you got a PR company to spin you in the best possible light (spin is always suspicious.) Right at the beginning of this story I shared a first attempt at writing a dating site profile, and critiqued it with today’s eyes. At the time, I didn’t follow the advice I’d give myself now. I didn’t whittle and weed. My reaction to a lot of rejection, and things going wrong, was to go the other way and make my profile more elaborate, and more detailed, and to appear to demand more (though that was never the conscious intention). I think this was a lot to do with not being picked. The men I’d picked weren’t picking me. The message I received was that I wasn’t good enough. My reaction to not being thought good enough was to make it clear that most of the people who viewed my page weren’t going to be good enough for me. There was quite a bit of FUCK YOU involved. Though I hid the FUCK YOU deep inside long, specific lists.
When I reviewed my old out-of-date spiels, ones written at earlier times, on earlier days, I was always horrified. Oh my God, I’d been known to shout—making the dog look anxious—that’s terrible; you sound desperate, self-aggrandizing, prescriptive; you sound like one of those people with a wish list, when the truth is you don’t have a wish list, not beyond ordinary decency, a bright mind, warmth in the eyes, a general wry optimism and lack of cynicism, a sense of the absurd, a love of reading and cinema, and—oh no, there it is; it’s happening again.
Scottish James rang again to say he thought we should have the lunch. I said I didn’t think so. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was frying onions for a curry. I’d come over and join you, he said, but I’ve had half a bottle of wine. Really, I said—so who had the other half? Ha ha, he said, no no, the other half is for tomorrow; it’s just me, just me in this big empty house that I’m going to have to put on the market. “I can’t shake the feeling that we’d have great sex,” he said. I told him he was projecting like mad, that it was unlikely, and that if it was a pickup line—seriously, he needed to stop. He rang off. Later, he texted asking what I was doing. I said I was reading on the sofa. He said he wished he was on the sofa with me, because he could distract me from a book very rapidly.
“Maybe I don’t want to be distracted,” I told him.
“Let’s have lunch and sex afterwards,” he said. “We’re middle-aged and need to grab opportunities and live a little, what do you say?” I said no thanks. “You need to become a yes person,” he told me. “I’ll get you saying yes; you’ll be shouting it.” (Oh, good grief.) “À bientôt,” he said, making his husky voice huskier. “I’ll call you.”
At 11:30 p.m. he rang again, sounding as if he’d drunk the other half of the bottle. “There’s something I want to do to you,” he told me. Oh, I said wearily, what’s that? “I want you to bend over the table,” he said. “I’m going to run my hand up your thighs and up into your scanty little pants.” I told him they weren’t scanty, as it happened; they were more like the kind of navy blue knickers we used to wear under our hockey skirts. He said my sternness was sexy as hell; was I the hockey mistress? He’d always had a thing for female games teachers; he’d like to back me into a sports cupboard and have me against the wall. He texted me immediately I’d rung off to say he was hard. I texted back to say I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. He told me I was a bitch like all the other bitches, and then I blocked him. So that was nice.
I went back and looked at Edward’s profile. I’d copied it onto the desktop, knowing that if we were going to meet I’d want to look at it multiple times. I didn’t want the site to chalk up an embarrassing number of visits. “Hello, Edward,” I said aloud, feeling suddenly hopeful again.
Edward was back in touch the day after this, apologizing for the delay. He’d been in the USA for work, he said, and he’d still like to meet, and did I have a preference for an evening, a time, a venue? “Oh, hello again,” I wrote, cool as you like; cooler than some cucumbers. “I assumed you’d looked at my profile and changed your mind.” (If he had really been in America, he’d been looking at it from there, too—the visits racked up had now reached double digits.) It was clear we might not naturally be in sync. I was dating-site-paranoid and had a tendency to catastrophize. He was cautious and had a tendency to ponder. This combination, I recognized, might not be ideal.
There are people in the world who understand that going quiet can be interpreted as an ill-mannered lack of interest, and there are those whose answer to that is basically, “Er—what??” Half the population of the world is puzzled by the rest misreading significance into things. “Your profile is lovely; what could possibly be wrong with your profile?” Edward offered gallantly. His Red Alert button, one that might go off in the presence of neurotics, could easily have begun to flash at this point. Even over email I could sense him frowning—after all, he’d only gone quiet because he was away. It seemed best to him to wait until he got home, to fix a date for a day or two later. He was right. Casualness is potentially a lifesaver in a world of heightened expectations and rampant delusion like semi-blind dating. After all, generally it’s just an arrangement to drink an astringent red wine in a busy pub with someone you’ll meet only once.
While Edward was in America, being silent, I’d had two dating site messages. One was from Alec, a knowing-looking, self-satisfied-sounding man. “Have a look at my profile,” he’d written, “and let me know if the woman I’m looking for sounds like you.” He didn’t use my name. It was obvious that I was included in a mass mail-out, in which an unknown number of us had been invited to pitch, so that Alec could assess us. Alec wanted somebody strong, self-aware, productive, funny, politically literate, able to converse on most topics fluently; someone with emotional intelligence, adept at expressing their feelings, someone prepared to work hard at the relationship. Alec made me tired. I told him I wasn’t that
person; I hate the idea of having to work at love. Love should be easy, like Sunday morning (thank you, Lionel Richie). Love should be a refuge for both people, from everything that’s hard about the world, as soft and comforting as an old blanket. What would “working hard at the relationship” entail? I asked him. Would there be a lot of talking about how we were doing and progress reports and homework? I’d overstated the case, he told me, but yes, of course there needed to be honesty, there needed to be monitoring; couples should keep the other person in touch with how they were feeling and what they needed. It sounded like continuous assessment and marks awarded and vows to do better. That’s not me, I told him, but good luck, I wish you luck.
I’d also had a message from a man called Michael, a bald man with a middle European look and round glasses, and a suspicious-of-all-comers expression. Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow, he suggested. I felt I ought to declare that I was talking to someone else and about to fix a date. He said it was just coffee, and what did I have to lose? I said I’d let him know next week, if I was still free. I mentioned that I’d prefer to meet in the evening at a pub somewhere, as daytime first dates made me nervous, and dimmer light with wine to hand was better. He replied asking if I had an issue with alcohol, as he was wary of that. Nor was it going to be a date by any stretch of the imagination, he added: it was a cup of coffee and some carrot cake, not a date as he understands the term, but whatever. Whatever.
I’d always said that I needed someone serious-minded, and Alec and Michael were both serious-minded, but they were the wrong sort of serious-minded for me. That wasn’t the kind of humorless seriousness I needed. I wondered if these things came in threes and if Edward was going to be the third.
We had arranged to meet the following Sunday night. His thinking was that we should eat something, rather than just meeting for a drink. Our places of work were twenty miles apart, so lunch was difficult. I agreed to dinner; I’m in favor of eating during first dates, as it gives you something to do. Menus have to be studied, and cutlery has to be deployed, and spearing and cutting has to be done, and food has to be selected and dealt with and chewed. Talking is done during a physical activity, which is always better than dealing with a social vacuum (it’s why I’ve always been keen on dates that are also walks, or museum/gallery visits). A date without food is one that’s more under pressure. There are no natural distractions if you’re sitting opposite one another in a wine bar and there is nothing to do except look one another in the eye. Dinners have a natural shape and come to a natural end: the complimentary mints are eaten, the bill is paid, and you go out onto the street. There’s no international agreement as to how many beers are the norm, on a drinks-only date, and breaking off and going home can be difficult to initiate. Dinner would give us something to talk about—whether our steaks were tough, for instance, leading into the story of the best one we ever ate, should the chat threaten to run dry. I had a memorable-steak story.