by Stella Grey
My dog loves Edward. He’s become our dog, slowly and surely. The dog prefers him to me, and looks to him for instructions and praise; there’s a lot more wagging if Edward’s holding the lead. I’ll get used to it. My mother loves Edward, too: loves him sincerely and always asks about him on the phone. How is he and what’s he been doing? Is he well? Sometimes I put him on to talk to her and they smile at one another in words. “Such a lovely man,” she says to me, at least twice a week. “You picked a good one there; you were so lucky.” She’s been known to shake her head in wonder at the fact that I found him on a dating site (soupofdepravity.com)—as if I’d bought a crappy ring at a market and the jewels had turned out to be real. When they met for the first time, she was impressed by his height, his gentleness, his good manners and by his having real handkerchiefs rather than tissues in his pockets. He reminded her of my dad in some ways, she said, sounding a little bit infatuated; Edward knows how to be impressive to mothers. We see his parents fairly often as they live close by, and we get along well, the four of us; there’s always plenty to talk about. Chief Sensible Friend approves, too, which is a relief; we say it doesn’t matter what our pals think of our partners, but actually it matters a lot. The posse are happy for me, now that they’ve stopped being tentative about the whole thing in case it didn’t last. My sister, who lives far away, has met him and has given an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Jack hasn’t met him, but says he couldn’t be more pleased. He’s a little bit envious, at the same time, of the love that we’ve found and that has eluded him for a long time.
Edward still holds my hand in the street, every time we go out together. He strides along, so if we’re late or have to go uphill the offer of a tow is genuinely useful. I’ve also learned that he can be gloriously silly. He can go off on a riff and develop it. Seventies children’s television comes up quite often and I join in; I do Johnny Morris–style voices to nature documentaries, and vocalize the dog’s thoughts. We’ve amassed a fund of private jokes and still do crosswords at the weekend. Though naturally a quiet man, Edward can become extremely talkative—and he’s also a good listener. He has deep reserves of goodness. If I’m upset, he says, “Tell me what I can do.” He steps forward to deal with trouble, and deals with it unflinchingly. He’s also profoundly tactile. He pauses to put his arms around me when we’re cooking, and holds me close to his chest and makes his Edward noise (“hmmrrrmmrrrmm.” He says it’s his Ent noise). He snuggles up in bed and says how lovely it is to snuggle. He’s the prince of back rubs. If I can’t sleep, he tells me a story. He opens his arms and invites my head onto his shoulder.
It’s possible that Edward could make his own list of ways in which I took him astray from the woman he had in mind when he signed up to online dating. But he doesn’t really think like that. He’s the most uncritical, non-judgmental person I know. When we met friends at outdoor seating for a beer, one chilly night, and he saw that I was cold, he tried to give me clothes of his own. Would I like his jacket? I must take his scarf. I murmured that I couldn’t get my own coat to close up, because being with him and in the radius of his near-constant snacking was making me fat. I met his eyes when I said this, waiting for a reaction there that he wouldn’t have time to hide. But instead he maintained the same loving eye contact and said, without a beat of time passing, “Well, just buy a bigger coat.” (I didn’t. I have given up biscuits.) We amuse each other with our assumptions and anecdotes and foibles. It’s one of the ways in which we’re still traveling towards one another. Being with someone new in your fifties: it prompts you to look at the whole sweep of your life. You see patterns there. You see the path behind you and the one ahead. You might see someone else’s path and the two converging into one. We can see that path now.
When the owners of the flat I was renting gave me notice that they were going to sell, and I began to think about where I might move to, Edward decided that it was time he moved, too; that he had to get out of his tragic bachelor pad with the uncomfortable budget sofas and worn carpets and windowless boxroom kitchen. “I should start looking for something to buy,” he said. “Maybe you could help me look—if you’d like to.” I told him I would. I’ve always loved property hunting, studying floor plans and thinking about colors and furnishings and making homes homely. “As you know, I could badly do with your advice on these things,” Edward said. (It was true.)
Do you remember, at the beginning of this story, my telling you that after my marriage failed I spent some time eating whole tubs of ice cream and crying over property search programs? Home has always meant a lot to me, not just as a fact but as an idea. I talked a lot to long-suffering pals about not being able to paint walls, when I took the rental, after the divorce took 50 percent of my house fund away. I became borderline obsessive about the wall-painting issue. Not being able to paint walls was a hard thing to have to accept. Living in someone else’s flat, my landlord’s flat—his spare flat, at that—was tough for my pride in my surroundings, and my sense of myself. I admire people who can rent their whole lives quite happily and don’t have to deal with inner narratives about reward and punishment, but after everything I’d been through, not having a home that was mine for my old age felt like a punishment too far by the universe (though obviously it doesn’t do to anthropomorphize the universe). So I was thrilled to be invited to help with Edward’s flat search. We looked at some property listings online and discussed the pros and cons of what was available. It was going to be a tough search; he’d had the same divorce-related division of assets issue and so the budget wasn’t large.
Then he said, “Would you like to move in, when I find it?”
“What?” I said. “Do you mean as a lodger? As house sharers? I’d pay rent?” That was genuinely what I thought he meant. He knew I was looking for somewhere to live.
“Well, it’d be great if you could help with the mortgage, but that wasn’t what I meant.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I mean—shall we buy a flat together?”
My cheeks burned. I must have looked as if I were running a fever. “Buy a flat together,” I said. “You mean like—you mean . . .”
“Move in together. Live together. Be together,” he said. Having to spell it out.
“Together,” I said.
“We could go and see some flats,” he said. “This weekend. And choose one. That suits us.”
“Together?” I was so excited I thought I would be sick. Genuinely. I thought I would vomit up my happiness, right then and there.
“Yes,” he said. “What do you say?”
I said yes. And now we live together, in a flat that we chose. There are things in it that each of us brought from the past, but not many. Lots of those were given away and new things took their place. It’s a modest little home but it’s ours. It’s ground floor with its own front door and there’s a teeny tiny paved front yard for the dog to sit out in, and for us to sit out in on sunny days at our little bistro table, with cups of tea (or a beer, in the evening, while dinner’s cooking). There’s a small raised walled bed where I’m about to start killing a succession of plants, and a shed for the bikes and room for a barbecue. We might get a barbecue, so that Edward can burn chicken and I can stand by and applaud.
On days off we go out and about in the car we also bought together (his was gifted to his ex) and take the dog into the countryside and climb hills that almost kill me, to look at views that I take a million pictures of. Generally he takes only one, of me sitting on a rock scowling at him and telling him to wait because I’m not yet in position; that’s the usual pattern. I’d assumed that he wasn’t very fit, because when I inquired whether he did any sport he said that he didn’t, and probably ought to, which is pretty much my answer if anyone asks—I’m always just about to start swimming again, and have been on the cusp of doing so for a decade. But it turns out that he has two bicycles, one of them a posh expensive one, and that not only does he go off and do thirty-mile cycle rides for fun, but th
at he’s also done LEJOG, otherwise known as Land’s End to John O’Groats. I’m not sure my Pilates for Nanas DVD is really up on the same sort of level. But never mind.
Thankfully the trips we do together are rarely physically challenging. We go to places on buses, and have been known to take a picnic. We take trains. We have outings (expotitions, because that’s what Christopher Robin went on), to stately homes, where Edward’s always unfailingly nice about my critiquing the décor. We visit historic sites and cathedral cities, and spend days in green places, rambling towards pubs that have good beer. In short, we’re utterly, contentedly middle aged. We read on the sofa together, one at each end. We’ll interrupt each other, sometimes, to say, “Hey, listen to this,” and read out a section that has grabbed us. It’s what I asked the universe for, when I started online dating: a bookish, kind man who’d enjoy reading with me. Sometimes the universe gives you what you want. I like this idea. Sometimes it’s satisfying to anthropomorphize the universe.
In short, we are happy. I have my heartfix, and he has his. Love is more precious, in some ways, the second time around. We’re more aware of how lucky we are, and because of that heightened awareness, we’re more careful with the precious and the lucky, perhaps. We take care of one another, in every possible way. We don’t argue, but if there’s disagreement we sort it out quickly, and steer it towards laughter (usually at ourselves), and we don’t let anything get in the way of our rapport.
We are happy, and it’s amazing to be able to write those three words and not feel the need to qualify or footnote them. It’s taken time and a lot of ups and downs to get here, to the point at which I’m able to use three words, but I can use them now, confidently, without fear and without creeping doubts. Another, happier phase of life has begun. The best part about this ending is that it isn’t really the end.
693 Days
The Guardian column that led to this book wasn’t the beginning of the process of writing. The diary came first. Every day that I was listed on dating sites, I wrote an entry in a journal which became a series of journals (they now form quite a pile), recording what was happening, who I was talking to or seeing and the conversations I was having. The Guardian column lagged quite some way behind events. I wouldn’t have agreed to do it in real time; it wouldn’t have been fair to any of us, and might even have altered the outcome.
There wasn’t any initial intention to publish. I wrote because I was lonely and sad and heartbroken, and—having been made to feel profoundly unloved at the end of my marriage—I needed to know I was lovable, and needed to love in return. Contentment was the goal, rather than a relationship specifically. It wasn’t at all obvious when I started that I would find someone. If the dating experiment was going to end with realizing I was going to be single, possibly for the rest of my life, then that was okay. It had to be.
Undoubtedly I was naïve when I started. I went into online dating assuming that all my interactions there would be with men of about the same age and with the same interests. I assumed all those other people would be looking for undying love with life partners . . . and then I arrived and was pelted with questions about whether I wore stockings or not. Of course there were also encounters with good people (most were essentially good people, even if some of them were behaving badly; we need to distinguish between the two), but most of the time I was blanked, or propositioned, or challenged or scorned, or ignored or put in my place, or propositioned some more. Writing the journal helped navigate through the weirdness. When I stopped writing I found I had 215,000 words. Some passages have been reproduced here without any editing. In others I have paused and reflected on how I felt and how I acted, with the different eyes of hindsight.
I thought there might be a book in the diaries at about the halfway point, when it was all going very badly. This was a year into the search and long before I met Edward. I added a lot of soul-searching and bleak diagnosis to this possible manuscript, and my ex was mentioned quite a bit. In short, it wasn’t publishable. The last line was something like: “So that’s why you should stay away from online dating, dear readers. Avoid it like the plague.”
It was hard work, finding Edward. It took 693 days, from first signing up to a dating site to the day of our first date, and I went at the project hammer and tongs. I rolled up my sleeves and did online dating thoroughly. When I moaned, as often I did, that I wasn’t getting much of a response to my efforts, people would gently point out that in fact I seemed to be getting a lot of traffic and juggling a lot of email and requests to meet. Many of these, however, were the result of my own effort, in trawling sites and approaching men who wouldn’t otherwise have seen someone of fifty, or fifty-one. Often, in the account that you’ve just read, when I say that “I heard from” someone, it was contact made in response to my contacting them first.
I’m project-oriented by nature and so it took a lot of time. I wasn’t going to let this thing beat me, and the worse it got the more determined I became. But I understand why people give up; I almost did, after all. Online dating, purely in its mechanisms, its opportunities, its failure to punish rudeness and abuse—which all go on behind its own securely closed doors—doesn’t promote or reward courtesy, empathy, fidelity or tolerance. I’m not saying it should. Obviously “it” doesn’t have any moral character; it’s just a listing and messaging system. Theoretically it’s a neutral space, but nonetheless an argument could be made that it brings out the worst in some of us, our restless unsatisfiable worst. Certainly it encourages the idea that perfection must be out there, the perfect ten: it’s going to take hard work to find them, perhaps, because they’re currently in Finland, or Bolivia, or because—and this is the killer—they haven’t actually joined up yet, but they will, some time soon, some day. That’s not a state of mind I can envy.
One thing that makes online dating hard to generalize about is that there isn’t a predictable link between the amount of effort put in and the result. You could meet the first guy who asked you out and move in with him a year later, as happened to someone I know. You could write to six people every night for two years and get nowhere: I thought that was going to be my story. When the columns were published in the Guardian, I’d often be berated online for not giving a man enough of a chance, or too much of one. People made these judgments based on very few facts, and if you’re having a go at online dating, sometimes you will find your friends behave in similar fashion. “You’ve stopped seeing him—what’s wrong with him?” (As if he’s a vacuum cleaner and fixable.) Or, “You said no to a date, what the hell for?”
Don’t waste too much time explaining the ups and downs of online dating to your social circle. It can distort the way you see the process, and the people on offer, and even yourself. Tell them, “When there’s news I’ll let you know, but there’s no news at the moment.” Say, “Yes, I’ve had a few dates, but nothing serious; it’s been sociable and fun but I’m not seeing anyone, no.” (You might have to lie about it being fun.) Mothers, especially, might need to be fed these soothing useful phrases. I went round Europe hitchhiking when I was 18, and didn’t confess to my mum that I hadn’t done it by train until many years later. “Oh God,” she said, when eventually I told her. “I’m so glad you didn’t tell me at the time; I would’ve had a fit.” It’s the same with online dating. Don’t talk about it. It’s Fight Club. We don’t talk about Fight Club.
If you decide to ignore this advice and opt for keeping people informed, be prepared to be told you’re too picky. Hold fast to your pickiness, I say. It’s vital to trust your pickiness. Your search for love isn’t a recruitment process. You don’t need to refer to legislation and worry about fairness, and explain why you can’t hire someone, why they’re not getting the job. It isn’t a job. There’s no more personal process than finding someone to whom you will give full access, to your heart, to your body, to your future. It’s about complex feelings, not qualifications. This may sound like the bleedin’ obvious, but I’ve had to make this speech to people
at least three times.
On the other hand, don’t dismiss someone after one date just because “there wasn’t a spark.” I don’t know how this whole spark narrative got started, but it’s everywhere. If it’s used as an excuse and there was really another reason, I can see the point: it’s the classic “It’s not you, it’s me” in another guise. If it’s that the person was horrible, or talked about the Kardashians for forty-five minutes, or picked their nose while talking to you, then fair enough. Use the spark excuse with my blessing. But don’t get into an expectation that a spark must present itself in an otherwise nice evening spent with a nice person, and that if there isn’t an electricity episode, there’s no point having a second nice evening with the nice person with whom you got on really well. “We had such a good time, and he was really nice but there was no spark” is an irritating comment to hear. The persistent mythology of the spark has a lot to answer for.
I’m not arguing that everyone you meet ought to be given an allowance of a minimum three dates, on principle. What I’m distinguishing between is style and content. Don’t be too hasty in judging a person’s date demeanor or the flavor of their initial communications with you, because shy or nervous people take time to show themselves. Sometimes people are afraid, or ill or distracted by a problem or have no confidence or think you’re there on sufferance. Great people have off days.