The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary

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Stella Grey. The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary

Copyright

Contents

Twitter Comments

Introduction

Trying to Write the Right Profile

First Bites and Backbites

Sex and Sensibility

The Packaging

Out in Open Water

Fundamental Ironies of the Game

Landings on Islands

Back in the Fray

The Day I Decided to Quit

And Then He Kissed Me

What Happened Next

693 Days

A Final Dedication

About the Publisher

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Title Page

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Simultaneously via email we began to exchange Top Tens – our top ten films, songs, books, meals, cities, heroes, places, dates to return to in a time machine … you name it, we were Top-Tenning it. I barely had time to work, so intent was I on watching my phone and waiting for its little light to flash.

At the same time a small patch of unacknowledged anxiety had developed a pulse. It wasn’t just my physical self that was being misrepresented in this lead-up, by the sending of out-of-date photographs. In my communications with Peter I wasn’t really me, either, because I’d reframed myself so as to be more attractive to a man who seemed tremendously self-aware and self-possessed, and needed me to be the same. I camouflaged myself so as to attract him. I became, in the letters, the kind of person who could handle most things: charming, cheerful, non-melancholy and staunchly un-neurotic, whose response to the ups and downs was (almost relentlessly) philosophical. I wish I really was her, I thought – that woman Peter’s writing to. Of course it was perfectly possible that he was doing the same ventriloquism, covering up weakness and fear with comedy and wit, so as to impress women with his tremendous psychological health. It could have been a mutual confidence trick; there was no way of knowing. We had no inkling of each other’s complexities. As yet, we hadn’t even spoken on the phone.

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