Читать книгу The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary - Stella Grey - Страница 10

SUMMER, YEAR ONE

One evening, walking the halls of a dating site, looking in doorways and finding other doors firmly closed to me, I began talking to a man called Oliver, who – if that really was him in the photograph – was six foot three and darkly handsome. He was also twenty years younger than me. Prior to his first message he’d looked at my profile almost every day for weeks, unaware or else unbothered that the site notches up each viewing. It got to the point that he’d visited twenty-three times. What’s he thinking? I asked myself each time he came back and looked at my page; what’s he deciding? Is it the picture? Is it my age? The alpha-control-freak intellectual-snob thing? Eventually there was a message.

It said: ‘Hello, how are you?’

This is lazy, as opening gambits go. It gives away nothing while asking for a lot, and is fundamentally unanswerable. What was he asking for – the news that my glands were up, that my bank balance was precarious, that I couldn’t find a novel I wanted to read next, and that I’d put on a swimsuit earlier that day and said, Oh God in heaven, no? I think what he really hoped for was: ‘Feeling horny, shall we meet at a Holiday Inn and screw?’ The best reply to the ‘How are you?’ query is equally bland and meaningless: ‘Fine thanks. You?’ That way, the ball goes back into his court. He was the one who initiated contact, after all. A dating site shouldn’t be a machine that men feed a pound coin into and that delivers entertainment down a chute.

What I did instead, because I was bored, was tell him exactly how I was. It took five paragraphs and a lot of rewrites. At the end of my answer I asked how he was. He didn’t reply. I couldn’t believe it. I’d done it again.

So the next evening when he asked how I was tonight, instead of saying, ‘Fine thanks, you?’ I sent him an even longer answer, with reference to meals eaten, energy levels, lengths swum, the working day and the outrageous cost of a Fry’s chocolate cream at the corner shop: 80p! That’s 16 shillings! (He took my quaint shilling talk in his stride, perhaps aware that it was intended to emphasise our age difference.) I asked him how his day had gone. There was no response.

The next day there he was again. ‘How are you today?’

‘I could tell you,’ I wrote, ‘but what’s the point? You never talk back.’

‘You’re very attractive, do you want to meet for dinner?’ he answered. ‘Tonight?’

I said I couldn’t, sorry. And besides I’d already eaten. (I hadn’t. It was a lie.)

‘So what are you doing now?’ he typed.

‘Sprawled on the sofa with a book,’ I wrote, unguardedly.

‘Mmm. I like the idea of you sprawled.’

‘Ha,’ I typed back, completely unnerved. ‘But you are way too young for me.’

‘Girls bore me,’ he wrote. ‘I’m more interested in women, real women like you. Looking forward to our first date. Saturday?’

‘I can’t this week,’ I replied. I was sure that Oliver would take one look at me and run, which was a pity, because in many respects he was absolutely what the doctor would have ordered, if the doctor was a middle-aged woman who hadn’t had sex for quite a while. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ I said. It wasn’t even that I was interested in him. But I was determined to win this one. Online dating can be gladiatorial and I was determined not to be one of the Christians, munched up by a suave and smarmy lion.

‘You can find out all about me over dinner,’ he wrote.

The next day, there he was again. ‘How are you tonight?’ he asked.

Fine, thanks, I said. I left it at that.

He responded in real time, in twenty seconds – we were now having a real-time conversation on the screen. He wrote: ‘When we go to dinner, will you be wearing a skirt?’

‘Probably, or a dress. Why?’

‘Will it be short?’

‘Unlikely.’

‘Will you wear stockings, so I can put my hand under your skirt as we’re having a drink?’

‘That’s forward.’

‘I bet you have gorgeous long legs. Are they long?’

‘Not really,’ I lied. I am way out of my depth here, I thought.

‘And will you wear heels?’

‘Probably not. I might wear heeled boots.’

‘Wear heels, a short skirt and stockings, just for me.’

‘Oliver, I’m not really a heels and stockings kind of a woman,’ I wrote. ‘To be honest, I get kind of sick of all these clichés of femininity.’ I knew this reply broke one of the iron laws of online dating – pomposity! – but I was sick of them.

‘I have total respect for that,’ Oliver wrote. ‘It’s a good point.’

A thirty-second silence fell, while I contemplated his response, and he contemplated it also. I broke the silence. ‘Why aren’t you taking a woman your own age out to dinner?’

‘Women my own age want marriage and babies. I don’t want marriage and babies.’

‘Ah.’

‘Meet me.’

‘Not now. But some time. Maybe.’

‘You like to play hard to get, then.’

‘Hard to get? We’ve barely said hello. Tell me more about yourself. Something. Anything.’

He didn’t reply, but for ages afterwards there were near-daily messages wanting to know how I was. I stopped responding, other than to ask him, twice, why he kept doing it: what was in it for him? He didn’t say. It was mystifying.

I had a chat with two friends who were also ‘listed’. (This was the shorthand we’d developed for discussing online dating. ‘Is X listed?’ ‘Yes, she’s been listed for over a year.’) One of them couldn’t help but be amused about my discussing ‘the search for the One’. ‘You don’t really think men are looking for the One, do you?’ she asked me. (She had become cynical by then.) ‘For most of them, sex with a lot of people and avoiding being in a couple is precisely the point of the exercise.’ According to her, men were treating these sites like a giant sweet shop, and were picking bagfuls of sweets. Some of them were tasting in order to whittle the choice to one, she conceded, but others had begun a bachelor life of new sweets every weekend, and had no intention of stopping for anyone. ‘Men see the sea of faces on dating sites and think, All these women are basically saying, “You can have sex with me if you want,” but I don’t think that’s what most of us are saying.’ The woman in the group who’d been dating the longest said she understood the male perspective. It wasn’t just men who were behaving that way. She was too. ‘I find I’m the same these days. I find someone nice but then I get drawn back in. There is always the possibility of someone better. It’s difficult to draw a line.’

Sometimes a Sunday was spent at home, trawling the listings in my pyjamas, sitting cross-legged and eating leftover Chinese takeaway (and every other food not nailed down in the fridge). It’s easy to become obsessive about the online dating search. It’s like the kind of feverishness that can grab you when you’ve sold one house and can’t find another. The process becomes compulsive, until eventually, inevitably, you begin to reconsider places that you put in the No pile. Hours could pass unnoticed in the time spent ‘just popping in’ to a dating site. I found myself scrolling through the hundreds of faces on screen, all of them saying (at least theoretically), ‘Talk to me; I’m here, I’m free, I’m looking for someone to love, and it might be you.’

But maybe not this one: ‘I like my independence but I’d also like a certain kind of female company on my days off.’ Or this one: ‘Living the dream working in a call centre, and need something to come home to other than existential despair.’ Though he received a comradely pat on the shoulder.

In online dating there is such a thing as a kind lie. It’s sent in response to an unwanted approach, as a sort of kindly meant shorthand. It’s a brush-off that’s politely worded, designed to avoid hurt. It avoids listing the nine reasons why you don’t want to have coffee. Usually I’d say something like, ‘I’ve just begun seeing someone and am only here checking my messages, but thank you, I was flattered, and good luck.’ In online dating, the kind lie is vital. I wish the men who use the sites understood this. I’d much rather be sent the kind lie than be ignored. Being ignored doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, not interested,’ so much as ‘You are beneath my notice.’ It says, ‘You’re not worth fifteen seconds of my life.’ It might also say, ‘At your age and non-thin, you need to lower your sights somewhat; please take my non-reply as a hint.’ These are not good thoughts to be sent swirling into the 3 a.m. insomnia of a person with flat-lining morale.

Ignoring is just bloody rude. None of the men who didn’t reply would blank me if I said hello to them at a party: why should the internet be different? At a party you’d be polite in a style that indicated, in a grown-up way, that you weren’t romantically interested. You’d say you must mingle, and you’d move on. You’d give the impression of being already attached. These are kind lies we all use in life. But perhaps when they’re online, some people behave in a way that they would all the time if they could get away with it. Perhaps there’s a gloriously liberating quality to being able to behave badly, particularly after a long marriage, and decades of behaving well.

I began using the kind lie quite a bit. It was a way of dealing with being pestered – not for dates, you understand, but for sex. The lie about having just got involved with someone is effective with the sex-pests. It reads, to them, as, ‘You were just too late at the sweet shop, sunshine; sorry.’ The sex-pests are generally attuned to the Man Code (one item of which reads: ‘You don’t shag another man’s woman in an alley’).

I also used the kind lie on the man who had a very particular vision of what his woman would look like (despite closely resembling a fruitbat himself). He went into detail so specific that it even considered her fingernails (short, but shaped, and painted with clear gloss). He wanted to know if I’d consider dyeing my hair red, and whether I was even-tempered. ‘The woman I’m looking for will make me smile continually when we’re together and will ensure that I miss her when we’re apart,’ he wrote. I told him I was in the early stages of talking to someone, and wished him luck. Ordinarily I wished people luck, though I didn’t to the bloke who wrote to assure me that being the bit on the side to a sexless union (his) would prove glorious and liberating. I got his picture back up and stabbed him in the heart with a chopstick.

I’ve had the kind lie used on me, by men who considered themselves out of my league. In one case I knew it was ‘the kind lie’ because I saw the person in question’s online light lit night and day for the next six weeks, as he scoured the listings restlessly for someone better. On one occasion I was caught out doing that myself, by a man I’d delivered the lie to. He called me on it. He’d seen my green light lit for days on end, after I’d said I was only there checking my messages. I felt bad about this. I had to apologise. I had to admit that it was just a useful shorthand. ‘It’s because you’re almost 70,’ I confessed. ‘And you live on the Isle of Wight. It wouldn’t be worth making huge journeys to see one another, because it wouldn’t work: as you say yourself, you don’t read, and you don’t like music and you’re allergic to dogs, and that makes us incompatible. You see, it isn’t better if I give you the real reasons, is it? I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. There’s someone for everyone. Perhaps start with people who live on the same island as you.’

‘Don’t be so fucking patronising,’ he responded.

I went through a period of getting a whole series of approach emails from men over 60, men approaching 70 who were aware that they were fighting the odds. They arrived in such a cluster that I wondered if one of the sites had put me onto a Seniors Site of some sort somewhere (and yes, this does happen – sign up to one outfit and you can find yourself repackaged elsewhere without permission being asked of you). I felt sorry for the men of 69, pretending to be 59, pictured looking caved-in and dejected, in an ill-fitting suit at a wedding, the ex-wife cropped out of the frame. Their way of approaching me was faultless and unappealing. They assured me they were gentlemen, that they were solvent LOL, that they had their own teeth haha, that they loved to travel and wanted a partner to spend their twilight years with. They were unanimously in search of a Lovely Lady. The trouble they were having in looking after themselves was sometimes mentioned, since being widowed, and it was clear that the lady being sought would be kept busy in the kitchen and at the ironing board. Though not all the seniors were merely in search of apple pie. There were plenty who were determined to get laid. I wasn’t charmed when a 75-year-old man told me he wanted to lick me all over. My response to an invitation from a 68-year-old, one written in textspeak – ‘how r u, u luk gr8 to me’ – was, frankly, openly snotty.

‘Was that message even in English?’

‘Love it, love a bitch,’ he wrote. His profile was headed: Looking for a quiet trustworthy woman – does she exist? He went on to say: ‘I should state right away that trousers, jewellery, high heels and makeup do nothing for me.’

I was tempted to tell him that I didn’t think they’d suit him, either.

Sometimes there’s a revealing little nugget hidden in an otherwise bland self-descriptive passage. ‘I have no objection to helping in the kitchen at weekends, but detest dinner parties and draw the line at home-baking.’ (Okey-doke. Well, have fun, won’t you, drawing your line and being single for ever.) ‘I’m widely and well-read, and can be relied on not to make embarrassing remarks in art galleries.’ In a way he was saying the right thing, but it was the way he said it. It wasn’t even that – it was the way I read it. The trouble with the written word is that it has no tone, or humour; there’s no corresponding facial expression. Both statements could have been meant jokingly. Among the sea of Man Vanilla, sometimes a person of strong individual flavour leaps out from the page. Sometimes a statement patently isn’t meant to be funny. ‘I’m looking for someone who has slept with fewer than six men,’ one man declared. ‘Apologies if this seems harsh, but I need someone I can feel morally confident about.’

Sometimes, it’s okay to ignore people.

When I joined a new site, a fairly new site that didn’t charge (yet) to list yourself like an old painting at an auction, I thought I’d hit gold. Zowie! There he was, on page one: Peter, an interesting-looking man, not handsome but interesting-looking, 56, and tall and sturdy in a cricket-playing sort of a way. He worked in education (despite my intended avoidance of men in education, I kept coming back to them, a moth to a flame). He had kind eyes and a nice mouth, a broad face and a big brain and a silvery patina; he had deep smile lines, and an expression of complete and benign friendliness, like a cow that comes to a fence. He was slightly bedraggled, unmaterialistic, disorganised, clever: that was my reading of him, in the lines and between them. I had an immediate feeling, an intuition. I looked at other pictures he’d uploaded: in one of them he had an attractively sceptical expression, and in another an expectant, amused look, like he’d said something mildly outrageous and was hoping I’d find it funny. His profile made me laugh because it was so guileless and rubbish and uncrafted, and he was four inches taller than me. I wrote admiring his writing style and didn’t expect to hear from him.

I got a reply the following morning. ‘Hello to you too,’ he wrote. ‘You look very interesting. I see we have things in common. We probably have mutual friends. What a pity we’re 100 miles apart. But let’s talk some more. As it happens I’m going to be in your neck of the woods in two weeks. Lunch?’

This gave me a thrilling idea. He wasn’t really going to be in my neighbourhood. He made that bit up, because he’d had the same intuition.

At Exciting Date Minus a Week it was proving difficult to think about anything else. I kept looking at Peter’s dating profile, saved onto the laptop, and rereading his emails, as if I’d notice something new, some small detail that would feed my expectation, or undermine it. I needed to know everything. We swapped real-world email addresses, and the letters kept coming, short but regular ones, at coffee pauses in the day and longer in the evening. I Googled him, reassured to see his identity confirmed, and saw him pictured in various online contexts: a slightly creased, almost-handsome, linen-suited academic. He had a bit of a food-loving, France-loving midlife belly, and eyes full of irony and warmth, eyes that hinted at arcane knowledge and originality. Irony, warmth? Arcane knowledge, originality? I was making huge assumptions about him, I was well aware, but couldn’t seem to put a stop to it. He might hate France; he might be well educated and stupid; he might be a wife-beater. I’d taken scant facts and joined the dots. I’d developed my own idea of Peter from the little fragments he’d given and that I’d collated from elsewhere, building up a picture, and Peter, no doubt, was forming his own idea of me. Until we could meet, nothing could really be done about that. It’s what happens. The mind rushes on.

I Googled myself to see what he’d see if he were to search for me. There wasn’t much, certainly nothing controversial, and there weren’t recent photographs, because I’d been hiding from cameras for five years. I was a good deal less slender than I was at 45, but shrank from mentioning this; I mean, why draw people’s attention to something they might not even notice? ‘Oh, PS, just so you know and aren’t surprised, I’m fat and probably sexually undesirable; I’m one of those overreaching overweight midlife women the nameless vampires of the bloke-internet enjoy disdaining. Just so you’re aware.’ So I didn’t mention the weight issue. It would be fine, I decided. I just wouldn’t eat any bread between now and then, and I’d wear a black dress with cunning fat-clamping panels. It would be fine.

Peter said that meeting would be great; meeting would be a hoot. ‘Hoot’ might be a word that signals fundamental unavailability. It might also be a word that brings its own lightness, its lack of expectation: it might be to do with fear of rejection. If events were only a hoot then there wasn’t much to lose. But that was fine. I was also badly in need of a hoot. Hot on the heels of the hoot email, a longer one arrived, one more frank about hope and heartbreak. It turned out that Peter had been married and divorced twice. This gave me pause.

‘So let’s get the nitty gritty over with,’ I wrote. ‘One paragraph on how your marriages came to an end, and then I’ll reciprocate. We’ll indulge ourselves just once in self-pity and then never speak of it again. You first. What did you do, to go and get yourself dumped?’

It turned out that he was the dumper, both times. The reasons were plausible enough: they’d been too young, the first time, and they’d grown apart the second time, and relations with the exes were said to be good. That’s how Peter passed the Dump Test.* (*If a man in consideration was a dumper and not a dumpee, my ears pricked up. If a man was a serial dumper, if he kept getting bored, like a restless kid with too many toys, or if he’d found a string of women sexually dull, there was often a loud buzzing in my ears. If he’d left a woman because she had let herself go, the conversation was probably over.)

This was the beginning of a bout of constant messaging, in which we swapped our sad stories, though we told them to each other in a Woody Allen-style voiceover, competing to see who could be funnier. ‘How are relations with the ex now – amicable enough?’ he wanted to know. Men kept asking me this. Men are somewhat obsessive on the question. Women don’t envisage punch-ups in suburban driveways with jealous ex-wives, but it seems that men do have visions of the reverse case. And of course none of us wants to be with someone with a lot of baggage, that horrible term for stuff about the past that still niggles me. The truth is that we all have stuff in the past that still niggles us. We all need to be with someone who can put their baggage aside, into storage. It can’t be eradicated but it can be left to gather dust.

Peter and I seemed to have equivalent baggage levels, ones that were minimal and undramatic. We both had a residual sadness, one we were confident could be assuaged by another love, by hope. Old sadness had become a new thirst. We agreed that in midlife there is always sadness, and it’s not all about lost relationships. At this point we’re likely to have suffered all sorts of losses – of family and friends, of hopes and dreams, ambitions and plans, of wild ideas and time. A lot of time had gone, never to be recovered. We agreed on all this and then we agreed not to talk about past relationships again, not until we knew each other a lot better. Each of us wanted to draw a line and reinvent life: that’s how we talked to each other, on the fourth day of emailing.

On day four Peter asked if he could have my mobile number. He had something important to ask me, he said. I handed over the number in some trepidation (please, not more deadly, unerotic stockings and heels talk) but there was no need to fear. The question was this: ‘Cryptic crosswords, yes or no?’ I answered – yes! – and asked him in a second text: ‘IKEA, yes or no?’ to which the answer, quite rightly, was, ‘Addicted to the meatballs.’ After this we were off, texting random questions to one another. By day five, dozens of whimsical queries had been sent. Whimsy was the key element. It provided safe and solid foundations. We were developing banter and were going to be friends, even if we weren’t going to be lovers.

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.

One afternoon, his messages began to venture beyond friendship. He texted that he was drinking coffee and about to go into a dull meeting, but was feeling happy because he had me in his life. The die was now cast. Once you go into this territory, and begin to talk ahead of your current reality, there’s no going back. It’s genuinely very hard to resist: it may not seem like it, sitting where you’re sitting (I wouldn’t have believed it either) but it is. Romance, real romance, being courted and wooed, is a thing difficult to say no to. It’s especially difficult when you’re sad. You’re sad, and not very hopeful, and suddenly there’s this wonderful man, clever and witty and kind, telling you that his day has been made better and brighter because he has you in his life. You might find yourself swept up in it, and responding in kind. It’s easy. ‘I’m so glad I have you in my life, too; I have a spring in my step that wasn’t there a week ago, and that’s down to you, Peter.’ When you respond in kind, it’s game on. The trouble is that in many cases game on leads swiftly to game over.

‘I can’t wait to meet you; I can hardly wait,’ he wrote. ‘I’m enjoying this, but I want more. I want a lot more.’ It was clear that it was time to come clean, so I sent him an email confessing to looking my age. His reply was titled SNAP; he said he’d put on a good stone and was considerably greyer than in the site photograph. He didn’t care a jot, not an infinitesimal part of a jot, about my weight, he said. I wrote all this in my dating diary. And I wrote this: ‘I may be in love with him already.’

Because we’d already stepped over the line – not only into the possibility of love but the expectation of it – in the days before meeting we continued to rush things in a way that isn’t wise. We sped ahead far too fast; we were both accelerators, and it got seriously out of hand. Not sexually: we didn’t talk about sex but we were both madly romantic and sure. Some days I got twenty messages, many of them beginning, ‘Hey beautiful’. This bothered me because I’m not beautiful. If he’d decided I was a beauty, I knew that we could both be in a lot of trouble. The communications ratcheted up. I’d get a text saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day,’ and could reply that I’d been the same, because it was true: thinking about him, and composing emails and questions, and answers to questions. And yet, so far we hadn’t even spoken.

Two days before the date he texted that he wanted to hear my voice. I’d avoided the phone, feeling that it was an extra audition that I might fail, and was nervous all day, watching the clock, but needn’t have been. We talked for over two hours, and afterwards he texted that he seemed to be falling in love, though how was that possible? It couldn’t be real, this attachment, he said, but it felt real, and this was all new territory and he didn’t quite know how to navigate it. I confessed that I felt just the same. When he didn’t reply to a text one afternoon, and then didn’t react to a follow-up one asking if all was well, I messaged saying, ‘It’s been four hours since I heard from you and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Is that weird?’ Of course it was weird; it was downright dysfunctional. I’d sit at the computer, trying to work, and really I’d be waiting. I’d smile at the mobile when another of the questions arrived that we continued to ask one another. ‘Do you like Victorian novels?’ ‘Do you ever make bread?’ ‘Do you have any phobias?’

In two short weeks, my life had become Peter-oriented. All the usual procedural stuff – house chores, phone calls, admin, arrangements, seeing friends, the ordinary obligations, and yes, doing the work I was contracted to do – began to feel difficult, even unimportant. I put things off. Others were put on hold. A period of romantic mania gripped me. I was in an altered state, one that was all-consuming. I was constantly, tiresomely upbeat and full of energy. I was of Doris Day-like chirpiness. I laughed easily. I sang as I cleaned the bathroom. I smiled all the way round the supermarket, and made slightly manic chat with checkout operatives. I had become someone who talked to people in the street, if the opportunity arose. I was Pollyanna, relentlessly playing the glad game. This is it, I thought: this is all it takes to be happy – a constant flow of love and attention, given and received. I told myself it didn’t have to come to an end, this flow. I found myself wondering if we’d always text each other these little endearments, even when we lived together. I was genuinely thinking in these terms, but this was somebody I hadn’t even met yet. I was infatuated by the state we had talked ourselves into; each email, each text provided another rush of love sugar. Ego, insecurity, narcissism, fear: they were tangled together like the jewellery I never wore any more.

So, the day of the date arrived.

I was nervous, not least because, owing to the distance, he was staying for the whole weekend. He’d booked a hotel not far from my flat. Our first date was to be a weekend together. This was fine, though, because we were already in love, or so we imagined. I joined him after his meeting, outside a bistro, and our eyes met as I was threading my way through other pedestrians. I’d gone to a lot of effort: a mid-calf black dress with fat-clamping panels had been purchased, and new black boots, and I’d had my hair done. Despite this, Peter’s face registered disappointment that he struggled to hide. His appearance surprised me too. He was broader, greyer and looked older than I was expecting, and he had a weary and anxious air. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed there would be a romantic first contact, a kiss that would set the tone for the day – it felt like we’d already had a lengthy build-up to that – but the hug he offered was a formal one. I stepped back, and looked into his eyes, and his cool blue eyes looked back. I looped an arm around his neck and kissed him on the mouth, a closed-lip kiss, perhaps, though not a great-aunt-at-Christmas dry peck of a kiss. He seemed surprised; he pulled away. We were five minutes into an itinerary involving lunch, strolling, drinks, theatre and dinner, a night and then another day – and it already felt like a disaster. It was a disaster. Things were going to get worse.

Despite the big preamble, our big lead-up, everything we’d shared, the intimacy we’d achieved, Peter and I were strangers. There was no natural resumption of where we’d left off, like old friends who meet after a long time. It was awkward, because we were strangers. We hadn’t expected one another. I had thought I knew him – that had been the illusion we’d both created – but he wasn’t what I’d anticipated at all. I don’t mean in terms of his appearance, but in every other way, in his body language, his natural scent, his demeanour, what he said, the way he spoke, and the look in his eyes when he did so: his whole vibe. He was alien and so was I. I was a woman he hadn’t expected, either, one he knew already that he wouldn’t ever fancy, perhaps, but there wasn’t any easy ducking out. The detail of the day had been gone over and over, and I had theatre tickets in my wallet.

We began with lunch, where, once we’d ordered the food, the conversation immediately flagged. Peter, staring off towards the windows, looked like a boy who’d been kicked hard in the shin, or like a man pleading with the universe to send someone to rescue him. I began to play the straight man, feeding him lines from emails of his that I knew would prompt long anecdotes. He’d worked for a time in the USA, and I asked eager questions about places he’d been, places where he’d felt at home and not felt at home. I was smiling so much that my cheek muscles hurt. Once he felt that I admired him and that he could make me laugh, he began to like me better.

After lunch we had a walk around the city together. We had a perfectly nice, if awkward day, wandering and visiting a museum, and stopping off at coffee shops. Over the third coffee I think he began to sense that I was disappointed; I think he saw that his own disappointment was obvious, and that he hadn’t taken care to disguise it, which was rude, and so he raised his game. Perhaps it had occurred to him that he wouldn’t ever have to see me again, and he was right, of course; he didn’t. Despite its preposterous origins it was, after all, just a date. So he did this mad veering in the other emotional direction. He acted like a man in love. He became almost giddy, when we came out of the café, and wanted to buy me a dress (an offer politely declined). We looked inside churches, like tourists, and he began to walk with his arm hooked around my shoulder. He asked me repeatedly if I was happy, and said repeatedly that he was. It was all becoming quite baffling.

At about five o’clock he said he needed a shower and would return to his hotel, and did I want to come. I said, ‘Sure, why not,’ and went with him, with a man I didn’t really know, on a first date, into his hotel room, because I felt safe, like most murder victims probably do. He made me a coffee and we sat together. It was a fairly lavish affair, his room, with a sofa at the end of the bed. It was possible that he’d picked it in anticipation of a seduction he no longer wanted to go through with. He was keeping his distance, so I had to sidle up to him. There were, at my instigation, short periods of kissing, but they didn’t go anywhere further and it was Peter who broke them off. He made a bumbling speech about liking to take things slowly. He began to have the body language and tone of someone trying to make light of an unsolicited seduction attempt. Perhaps he’d been determined that there would be no physical intimacy, and maybe there were good reasons for that, but I had come to meet him absolutely sure there would be, and each of us surprised the other with our assumptions. I tried to make a joke of it and he made fun of me. It was clear that my assumptions were inappropriate. He said he really must have a shower, and I sat pretending to read yesterday’s paper, while he showered and changed somewhere out of sight. He’d already been there one night, and there was a Jack Reacher novel on the table, and I was surprised because the author hadn’t appeared in his top ten novelists. They’d all been determinedly highbrow. The minute he reappeared he said, ‘Right, let’s be off,’ and we trooped out.

I was deeply confused, at this point. The massive build-up had felt like a series of dates and (this does seem strange, looking back) I’d been sure that we’d be desperate to get our hands on one another. I’d imagined that we might even spend the next morning in bed, enjoying sleepy pillow-talk, face to face. I wanted to get first sex over with, so that it would be the official beginning of us as a couple and we could both stop being nervous, but the signs were that none of what I’d anticipated was going to happen. The signs were that the whole thing was already a failure, and my heart was heavy as we walked along the road together. He said nothing and his face had closed to me.

I was already dreading the evening, but in the end it was survivable. He downed three gin and tonics before we went to the show, and talked about his work, and in the theatre he startled me by reaching for my hand as we sat together in the darkness. Afterwards, over dinner, we talked about Shakespeare we’d seen and favourite box sets, and it was fine, though I had to pedal hard to keep the conversation going. Then, out on the street, he hugged me one-arm style and kissed my hair and said he was tired, and went off to bed. But not before a second attempt on my part. I felt the need to make things worse, which has been a habit of mine, at various times in my life: if things are bad, sometimes I just can’t resist making them a whole lot worse. In this case, my self-esteem had crashed, even faster than the relationship had. I tried to get him to sleep with me, once more. When he was hesitant I said, ‘I’m not going to talk you into this, Peter, obviously.’ (Looking back at this makes me sad.)

His train wasn’t until lunchtime, and we were supposed to be spending the morning together. He texted saying that unfortunately he had to work, so there would only be time for a quick coffee. I met him at a station café. He stood as I approached, but there was no kiss hello. He asked me how I was and said it had all been lovely and we must do it again soon, mustn’t we? I walked with him to the platform, where he said, ‘Bye, love,’ as he got into his carriage, kissing my cheek and not looking back. I went home feeling like a dam that would burst its banks, and had a good cry, because mysteriously the wonderful thing had been all wrong. I told myself that there had been too much for the day to live up to. I’d already had a text from him that said, ‘Well THAT was fun,’ with a smiley attached. The useful thing about emoticons is that they preclude the need for kisses. When the email I expected arrived, it said that he’d been thinking a lot about how difficult it would be to sustain a distance relationship, and how booked up most of his weekends were for the next two months, what with one thing and another.

I’d invested such a lot in this and I wasn’t prepared to let it go, not like that. But when I replied, suggesting we keep in touch, I got a long-winded response explaining that he was too busy to reply. The signs could not have been clearer – the man was virtually wearing a T-shirt with I DO NOT WANT YOU written on it; the man was virtually digging an escape tunnel – but I couldn’t let the episode go, partly because of a profound sense of failure. There were things that had to be said, and I said them, in eloquent letters that were deleted unsent. There wasn’t any point bringing something to a definitive end that might not be absolutely over. Perhaps it was just a blip. There are blips in marriages, after all, so why don’t we allow for the ups and downs, the shadows and light, in emergent relationships too? Why are we so quick to call it a day if things take a chilly turn? People are complicated and their lives have hidden complications, if you don’t know them very well (or indeed at all). I had been the one who’d rushed things on; I’d expected snogging, at the least, and he had resisted me. I think it was his absolute determination not even to kiss me that made me need to humiliate myself. He’d been really, really clear, in some ways, but then he hadn’t been able to stop himself transmitting mixed messages, perhaps out of kindness. And so there was leeway for more self-delusion to take hold. It might not be the end of the relationship, I reasoned; it might just be a rocky beginning. I gave myself this talk and was partly persuaded.

I decided to have another go at resurrecting the situation. I texted Peter the next afternoon and told him I’d eaten too much lunch, a plate of spinach pasta dressed with oil and parmesan shavings, and had fallen asleep on the couch afterwards.

‘You should have anticipated that I was going to do that,’ I wrote jauntily, ‘and stepped in and stopped me.’

‘You need to take responsibility for your own life,’ came the reply. (What the hell? I was just attempting banter with you, Peter. You were supposed to reply in kind. It was silliness. Are men so unused to bantering with women that they think everything they utter is only ever literal?)

Stressed by a peculiar sense of injustice, I went to stay with my mother. Bored on the long train journey, I decided to initiate a text Q and A. Two weeks ago Peter had been mad for a bit of whimsical Q and A. I began with, ‘So when did you last eat cheese?’ I admit I felt a little unwell, a little neurologically unusual. I was exhibiting signs of being just the kind of woman men on dating sites are talking about, when they say, ‘No stalkers or bunny boilers.’ Peter didn’t reply, so I texted again, saying I was on a train and bored, and off to see my mum.

His response was, ‘Have a great trip.’

I texted straight back. ‘Are you okay, is everything okay?’

The phone buzzed a minute later. ‘Lot of work to do, and things on my mind. Talk to you when you get back.’

I couldn’t leave it that long, the not knowing. We had to have a straightforward conversation. But I couldn’t ask the question I wanted to – namely, ‘Is it over, our thing?’ Instead I texted again. ‘Do you like trains and long train journeys?’ He didn’t answer. Forty minutes later, a long, long email about his work travails and tiredness and low mood arrived instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at the end. So that seemed to be that. I felt a kind of relief. It was over, whatever it was. It wasn’t going to drag and dribble on, at least, and there’s a lot to be said for that. But – and I couldn’t help obsessing over this – what was the reason it had failed? We’d had a connection and something had happened to it. It had died. Was it my fault? I wasn’t going to take responsibility for the madness, the twenty million emails, each growing more intimate and rhapsodic, that had preceded the date, because that was absolutely mutual behaviour. But I had the unsettling feeling that somehow or other I was blamed, for bewitching him and then letting him down. For not being pretty, perhaps, or slender, or charming enough, or young for my age, or fascinating. Since meeting me in person, his sense of let-down had been almost palpable.

My poor mother suffered three days of dealing with a lunatic oriented completely towards her phone. I said I seemed to have developed an addictive personality and alarmed her. ‘Not drugs, surely not drugs,’ she said. ‘Please tell me it isn’t drugs.’

‘It isn’t drugs,’ I soothed. ‘I have no interest in drugs, honestly, other than cabernet sauvignon.’

Cabernet sauvignon, or at least the second bottle, was a really bad idea, the kind that seems inspired and brilliant at the time, and makes everything wonderfully clear. Late that night, cabbed up, I wrote a heartfelt email, full of reckless honesty, and went to sleep happy, and woke up shrieking. My mother rushed in, because I was shouting, ‘No, no, no, dear God, please no!’ And yes, the email I had sent him was as bad as I feared, not only needy but borderline unhinged. In general I’d become borderline unhinged. So I sent a second email, which said: ‘Please digitally tear up last night’s drunken ramblings. Like you, I seem to be at a low ebb. It will pass. It’d be nice to see you again, if you’re ever back here. Meanwhile, I wish you all good things.’

A reply came shortly afterwards, saying he’d been tired and overwhelmed with work, and that’s why he’d been so humourless, and that he was sorry. Immediately following this, the phone rang and we talked for a while, about anything and everything, but not about recent weirdness. Afterwards he sent me a text message that said: ‘When we said goodbye just now, I felt like I’d been ripped from your side.’ This, of course, made everything all right. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said to myself. ‘You see, you see!’ It was worth persevering; sometimes good things start badly and this was going to be a prime example. I spent twenty-four hours thinking this, but then received an email from Peter saying that a) I was wonderful and also b) that he didn’t want to see me again.

Once it was properly finished, I looked back on our communication cycle with disbelief. I read it over again and didn’t recognise myself. It looked like an altered state. It was a hard transition, when the love-bombing came to an end, through Adoration Cold Turkey, desperate as a junkie and utterly miserable. But, in the case of imaginary relationships that have their origins online, maybe it was a typical pattern. My guess is that Peter saw immediately we met that the whole thing had been illusory, and if he decided that unfairly early, there isn’t any arguing with it. Intuition and chemistry – they both count for much more than internet dating would have you believe. Setting out to find a compatible person who thinks, talks and lives like you do is all very well, but box-ticking counts for little in the end.

Next, a nice-looking man called Henry wrote to ask if I was ever in Cumbria, because he’d love to invite me to lunch. Henry was 60, and I had to ask myself how I felt about 60, and specifically about being naked with 60. (You may already be saying that this is ageist. I’m just telling you honestly what I thought.) In any case, it wasn’t a qualm that lasted long. Most of us are going to get there, after all, to 60, and we’ll hope to be loved then, whether we have a wrinkly bum or not. I reminded myself that Harrison Ford was now in his seventies; would I say no to Harrison? Reader, I would not. An ex-policeman, Henry was tall and upright, broad-shouldered, and had a knowing look around the eyes, as if he’d been dented by life and had survived and wasn’t going to be a pushover. He was also near-bald, but a middle-aged woman who has issues with hair-loss had better go and buy a stack of jigsaws in readiness for the long nights alone.

He sent a head and shoulders shot that he’d just taken in his kitchen, showing a smiling attractive man in a frayed blue shirt. He was standing in a tiny cottage in the wilds, where he was attempting to live self-sufficiently. His dating site profile was skimpy; when I asked him why it didn’t give much away, he told me that words are meaningless and meetings are everything. After the Peter fiasco it was a view I’d come to have some sympathy for. On the other hand, a woman needs some clues and pointers if she’s going to travel right across England for lunch. He’d volunteered his surname and village, but I couldn’t find him anywhere via Google. I realise this is new-fashioned, but not being able to find someone on the web, not a trace, is a cause of anxiety to me. I’m simultaneously repelled and reassured by people who are bedded in to social media, who can be observed being droll on Twitter, who have many friends on Facebook and are demonstrably non-psychotic there. Henry seemed like a loner. He confessed that he didn’t like the internet; in fact, he loathed the internet and all its workings, he said. He thought it was responsible for a decline in our human culture. It’s an interesting debate but Henry didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. Some things are black and white, he said, and the internet has been bad news for the world, and that’s that. Well, not politically, I don’t think, I ventured; it’s brought people together, in terms of political cohesion, don’t you think? I mean, I think it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t become a voice of the voiceless; at its best it can sidestep news blackouts and bring worthwhile stories forward; it’s been known to threaten tyrannies, and help right wrongs. Henry wasn’t having it. He was, he said, a happy Luddite, and was convinced that humankind would be happier if it followed his lead.

‘I have paper books, and vinyl records,’ Henry wrote. He was confident that this was a superior culture to all others. ‘Come and see me. Come and visit. I’ll sacrifice a chicken.’

‘We could meet at a restaurant,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable coming to your house.’

‘It’ll be fun to meet someone younger,’ he said. ‘You seem young to me. The last woman I dated was 66.’

‘Can I ask you something? Are women of 66 looking only for companionship?’

‘God no; they’re all gagging for it,’ he wrote. Then another message arrived. ‘Why are you on this dating site? The truth now. No fibbing.’ It was hard to know what he meant. ‘You’re not coming to see me, are you?’ he wrote before I could reply. ‘You wouldn’t like me anyway. I have dirt under my fingernails. I don’t have any money. I watch a lot of sport on TV.’ His Luddite sensibility, I noted, didn’t extend to banning television.

While I was pondering, I received a surprise invitation to dinner. I emailed Henry and said that I thought it best to tell him that on Saturday I was going out to dinner with a man I vaguely knew. He didn’t reply, and when I went back on the site I discovered that he’d blocked me, so that I couldn’t message him again. The man who was going to take me out to dinner realised on Thursday afternoon that he was still in love with his ex-wife, and cancelled.

The turn of summer into autumn brought Finn, a man with thick, layered short hair, reddish brown, and smiley eyes and a beard and an interesting job in the arts.

Finn had a lot of charm, and a diverse life and plenty to say for himself. He had a creative job and a wide social network, and I was chuffed when all this light was shone in my direction. We emailed a little bit and then he wanted to go over to Skype. There are online daters who like Skype, and I can see why: quite apart from the potential for nakedness between strangers, it can be used for pre-screening. It’s almost like meeting. There are people who regard an hour spent on Skype with someone as a date. I’ve heard it described as a clean date: you get to ‘meet’ without having to risk a coffee shop or wine bar failure, without having to climb out of a bistro bathroom window. But I didn’t like Skype. I found Skype nerve-racking. I’d chatted to a man on Skype once before. I passed the first-round interview – which is how I thought of it – and was asked out, but then the date’s face fell when we met in person and he saw the body that was attached to the head. I was made to feel that I’d been guilty of some sort of confidence trick (what had I been expected to do – parade round my sitting room in a swimsuit?). So I wasn’t that keen on Skype. However, Finn was insistent that we should break the ice before meeting. He was more of a visual person than a verbal one, he said; he was dyslexic and typing took him a while. I felt bad, hearing this, about my knee-jerk reaction to men who can’t spell or punctuate properly. It had been a blanket kind of rejection thus far. I’d had a policy that associated those who couldn’t spell with those who didn’t read. (There’s a correlation, for sure, but no, it isn’t reliable.) I’d written, earlier in the dating diary: ‘I’m sorry, but if he can’t punctuate I don’t want to go near his pants.’ And now I felt bad about that.

Anyway, the upshot was that I said yes to Skype and answered nervously when the laptop screen began to ring.

So there he was – the cherubic and yet grave face of Finn the bearded. ‘Hey,’ he said, his eyes amused. ‘How are you?’

I’ve never found that an easy question to answer; I mean, what is it really asking? I told him I was all right. I didn’t have any comedy lines prepared. I was too nervous to be anything but robotic. ‘And how are you?’ I asked. ‘What have you been doing today?’

He didn’t answer the question. Instead he wanted to know what sort of sex I liked. I was vague and embarrassed. What’s wrong? he asked me. I said I was just nervous.

‘There’s no need for that, my little peach,’ he said. ‘Look, let’s ring off now, but let’s do it again tomorrow.’

I agreed, even though I didn’t want to. I had a general sense of having been cornered. Sometimes, though, we conspire against and corner ourselves.

‘Would you show me your tits?’ he asked, half an hour into our second Skype call. Strangely, for someone who detests this kind of behaviour, my reaction was helpless laughter. I got the giggles, and didn’t go into immediate emergency laptop shutdown mode. I’d drunk a whole bottle of wine – cabbed up – so as to feel less ill at ease, but it also dealt with the inhibitions.

I was lying on my side, and did as I was told and unbuttoned my shirt. I’ve always been a people-pleaser, keen to impress, keen to be liked, and sometimes this overrides my own inner voice, and caution, and basic good sense. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Look at your tits in that bra, oh my God you’re incredible.’ I slid the straps off my shoulders and he groaned. He was standing at the webcam wanking by then. ‘Christ, we have to meet, we have to meet soon and do this in person,’ he said.

I wanted to have a good cry. I said I had to go and ended the call.

The next morning when I woke, I had a hangover and was ashamed. But I didn’t cancel the date. I was miserable about the prospect of meeting him but I was overriding this with pep talks to myself, of the people-pleasing kind. I told myself not to be so uptight. Why was I so uptight about something so harmless as Skype sex? Why was I such a square? Why couldn’t I do as other women suggested and just have a good time, sleep around, enjoy being single, sow some wild oats, be adventurous with technology, without over-thinking it all? (Because I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t what I wanted.) In any case those weren’t the questions I should have asked. What I should have been asking was, why did you agree to that when you didn’t want to? Why did you pretend to think it was fun when you found it degrading? Why have you arranged to meet this man for a drink?

The following evening, Finn bombarded me with requests for another Skype call. I found myself having to be defensive. I had to be too busy. Were we in a Skype relationship now? Were there going to be expectations? I was the one who was going to look like a player if I backed out now; using a man for one cybersex episode and then dropping him like a brick; that wasn’t something I felt good about. On the other hand, I just didn’t want to do it again.

When we met in a large, dimly lit, vaguely trendy wine bar, I was already sure it was a mistake. I don’t know why I went. I had it vaguely in mind that it would be one drink and then I could send the liaison-ender, the text that explained that I didn’t want to meet again. How could I cancel a drink with a man I’d had sort-of Skype sex with? That would be horrifically shallow, wouldn’t it? (Wrong question, again.)

I got to the bar first and ordered a bottle of wine and two glasses, and drank a glass down. I felt quite sick with nerves. When Finn arrived, the first thing I noticed about him was that he had short legs, and was altogether not the five foot eleven advertised. He was Tom Cruise-sized, but had a megawatt smile, also à la Tom, and sat down heavily with a sigh saying he’d had a beast of a day and thank God for alcohol. I had a whole story prepared about a funny thing that’d happened to me that morning, and he listened, stroking his beard, laughing along. I noticed that he had really small hands, with short fingers, his nails bitten to the quick.

The hour that followed was pleasant enough, though it was devoted to the kind of biographical chat that you know is going to run out eventually. When we’d both tired of filling in the other person on what we’d done and places we’d been, the chat really did run completely dry, and the atmosphere grew strained. We both filled the gap by looking at our phones to see if there were urgent messages. There weren’t, not on my side anyway. He spent five or six minutes tapping away answering a work email while I gazed around at all the people who were a lot more relaxed than we were. When Finn had put his phone away he said, ‘Right – shall we go?’ We went out into the street, where people were standing smoking and groups of Friday night revellers were going by. Finn took hold of my lapels and drew me closer – I was in heels and he was quite a bit shorter than me – and said, ‘I know you’re unsure, but I have an idea of something that will make you a lot happier than you are right now.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘what’s that?’

He kissed me softly on the mouth and looked into my eyes, and kissed me again. He said that as it happened he was staying just over the road, at a friend’s flat, and did I want to come up for another glass of wine? I followed him across the street, and up narrow stairs to the second floor. I can’t tell you, convincingly, why it was that I agreed to this. It goes against every safety code, and I didn’t want to, but mysteriously I agreed nonetheless. I most certainly wasn’t going to have sex with him. I’d stick to one glass, and make my excuses and leave. I’d do that, and then later I’d send the text about not wanting to meet again. I’d use a kind lie of some sort. As soon as we’d had that drink.

The flat was small, a one-room studio, and it turned out that the friend wasn’t there; he’d given Finn the key. We were alone and it occurred to me that I might be in danger. I said I was just going to let a friend know where I was, because I hadn’t expected to be late, and then I went into the tiny bathroom and texted the address. When I came out he was sitting at the pull-out table by the bed – it was a studio so the bed was unavoidable – with soft music playing, the blinds down, the lighting dimmed. We had a drink and talked about jazz and then I said I ought to go, and he kissed me again. I didn’t want to kiss him, and the nylony strands of the moustache and beard didn’t add to the fun.

He began to remove my clothes, though for the first few moments I held on tight to the shirt that was being unbuttoned, because I didn’t want to have sex with him. Finn kissed me again and said, ‘Come on, let’s just have pleasure, and not worry about anything,’ and, more out of social embarrassment than anything, not wanting to be a square and no fun and a drag, I let him remove my clothes, and watched as rapidly he shed his own. I didn’t want to have sex with him, and yet I did. I already felt bad about it, and yet I let him continue. It had got to the point at which I didn’t seem able to say, ‘Stop, stop, I don’t want this.’ Of course I was able to say that, but I chose not to, and I know it’s lame to keep saying it was embarrassment that fuelled it, but that’s what it was. It was people-pleasing of an extreme kind. When I put my hands on his back, his skin felt alien and cold. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know this man, and I didn’t want this, and now I just wanted it to be over. I remain ashamed of myself, every time I remember. I’m ashamed of myself and also angry.

After a few minutes of failing to get the angle right he said I should get up onto my knees and face the wall, and so I did what he asked of me, and there was sex, of a sort, a dry and unappetising sort from behind. I was full of self-loathing and disappointment and it was completely humiliating. ‘Look, I’m going to have to go,’ I said eventually. I reached for my clothes and got my underwear on and my shirt and went to the table where my tights and skirt were.

Finn came up behind me and pulled my knickers down and started at me again. ‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ he shrieked. I was leaning forward, over the desk, caught in mid-reach for my clothes. It took him ten seconds to finish (and yes, he was wearing a condom, thank God). He wasn’t interested in whether I might like to have any kind of a finish of my own.

I said, ‘I have to go now, really.’ I put the rest of my clothes on hurriedly, and grabbed my bag and ran down the stairs and onto the street, and ran to the end of it, and walked along the next one wiping tears from my face. A couple stopped and asked me if everything was all right. ‘Bad date,’ I told them. ‘Just a horrible date.’

‘Oh God, we’ve all been there,’ the woman said jovially.

Finn had texted me by the time I got back. ‘Incredible orgasm! What a night! Night night darling xx.’

What? Seriously? It wasn’t possible he was as stupid as this. I didn’t reply. I told a friend what’d happened, and she was shocked and said the situation sounded abusive to her. I couldn’t really argue that, as I’d consented to it all, and hadn’t been coerced at any stage, and had allowed it to happen. But I began to feel as if it had been intended to humiliate, in a sly sort of way. Part of the humiliation, perhaps, was this pretence that there was anything romantic about it.