The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary

A message arrived shortly afterwards, from a man in Shetland, that took the form of a one-line quotation: ‘But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. Anon.’

‘Nice quote,’ I wrote back.

‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Most of the shadows in your life are caused by standing in your own sunshine.’

‘Corny, but possibly true,’ I wrote.

And that was that. I think I lost him at corny.

After this I went for coffee with a man called Sean. We didn’t have any kind of a lead-up. His request came out of the blue, and something about the plainness of that, the low expectations, made it easy to agree. It wasn’t a date, we said. It was just coffee, we said. (It wasn’t just coffee, of course. It was an audition.) I wasn’t hopeful, but you never know until you meet people. Plus, I was badly in need of something cheeringly ordinary. Over the previous week there had been a string of approaches from those that – kindly – we must refer to as oddballs. ‘I love women. Thin ones, fat ones, young ones, droopy ones, smooth ones, hairy ones – but especially the hairy ones.’ (Well, that was something, at least.) Closely followed by another message, one that was a lot less practical: ‘This fading world is a mirror of myself dying; I’ll be more alive a thousand years from now than at this moment. Discuss.’ And then: ‘I am interested in the occult, Satanism and Celtic mythology, which will be obvious from looking at my paintings, some jpgs of which are attached.’

Also, there had been a humiliating glass of wine with a man in a city pub. David. David was worryingly good-looking (I’d already lost all faith in my power to attract a handsome man) and he’d only seen strategic photos of my head and shoulders. His face literally fell when he saw me coming towards him in the bar. He spent most of our date acting out a fervent need to listen closely to the live band, and more or less shushing me when I spoke. At the end, out on the pavement, he said, ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ and strode away, smiling. I hate to think about being one of the stories these men tell each other in the locker room. I break out in a cold sweat thinking about my friend Jane, who had text sex with an online suitor, after he sent her links to cottages in Italy he thought they should buy. When finally they met, he went to the bar to get drinks and was never seen again.

Essentially the meeting with Sean was a blind date, though we’d seen each other’s pictures. His showed him: 1) on a boat, manning the helm; 2) with ice in his beard, on Mont Blanc; and 3) in sunglasses, in Spain with a beer. For online males this amounts to a fairly typical spread. My photographs were typical too: one serious face, one smiling one, and three flattering, semi-misleading holiday pictures (tanned and in wrinkle-obliterating light). After a while I’d added a frank head-to-toe one, too. Coincidentally, a certain Jeff wrote demanding properly full-length photographs. ‘Often the women here prove to have fat ankles,’ he said. (We didn’t talk further.) There’s a huge amount of dating site commentary by men reporting that women prove to be ‘fat’, though to some people that merely means ‘eats properly’ or ‘her knees aren’t the biggest part of her leg’.

It’s easy to get in a tizz about your pictures on dating sites. They say the camera doesn’t lie, but that’s a lie. Sometimes it does. It lies because it’s been digitally manipulated, or because its truth is a decade out of date, or because it’s one of those freakish rare shots that glamorise. We all have at least one photograph in which we look like someone else, someone better looking; in my case I’d been told I looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor (I don’t). It’s tempting to use that freakishly good one on your profile, not only for the obvious vain reasons but because the lucky angle with the filter applied offers a little bit of useful anonymity. None of us wants to be accosted in the street by someone exclaiming, ‘Oh my God – aren’t you Bunnykins27, who has a thing about men in linen jackets?’ (I’m not, by the way. And I might, but not more than the average woman.)

So, when I got to the café I found that Sean didn’t look much like his pictures, and nor was he ‘lanky’ either. His photos, he admitted, were fifteen years old. There’s nothing wrong with going bald and acquiring a post-divorce paunch and having teeth like tombstones, but it wasn’t what I was expecting, and so when he approached the café table I didn’t recognise him and told him I was waiting for someone. He was amused: the teeth were unveiled in a faintly alarming smile reminiscent of Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers. But he was nice. He was very nice and I was nice back, and we had a civilised cup of coffee. Afterwards, I said, ‘It was good to meet you,’ and he patted my arm and said, ‘Very best of luck with it.’ We exchanged a smile of mutual understanding and parted.

For a while, my personal statement said that the end of my relationship wasn’t my idea. I thought people would find it reassuring that I wasn’t a dumper but a dumpee. Most men didn’t find it reassuring at all. They preferred women who’d ditched men and were now about to choose them in preference. The spectacle of a dumped woman seemed to trigger something, curiosity and then a rush to judgement, disguised inside a series of questions. There was worry about taking on a woman another man had discarded. ‘What did you do to get dumped? Are you a bitch?’ I mentioned this in an on-screen chat one evening with a man called Neville, and asked what he thought.

‘You may as well give up now,’ he wrote, ‘and withdraw from here and save your money.’ I asked him what he meant. ‘It’s porn that’s your problem,’ he told me. ‘Now that porn is normal, now that it’s normal to look at porn online, that’s the downfall of the middle-aged woman. Men are convinced that if they become bachelors again, that’s the kind of sex life they’ll get. Young women, big tits, flat stomachs, a tight fit where it matters. There are loads of gorgeous young things here who’d be happy with a 50-year-old sugar daddy. You can’t compete with that.’

The question of competition kept coming up. I’d spent most of my life not fretting too much about whether men approved of me, but now I was having to resist scrutinising myself as if through their imagined eyes. I had flashes of self-disgust about the fact that I was so tall, and so big-boned and well-upholstered, and had such big feet. My waist had thickened and How was I going to compete? It was deeply disconcerting. I hadn’t ever seen myself like that, as someone not physically good enough to be loved.

Not having seen profiles written by other women (only women seeking a female partner see them), it was hard to know what the norm was, and how far I deviated from the average. I mentioned this to my friend Jack. Together we went in to my page and blitzed every one of the errors he identified: being whiney, being needy, being pompous and self-aggrandising (that hurt), overly conventional (Radio 4 was tussled over; I won) and too bookish. The argument that it was best to be myself cut little ice. Despite his efforts, despite adding baking, Sundays in London parks, gigs and beer to the list of things I like, I was still, Jack complained, all too evidently an alpha control freak and raging intellectual snob. That was limiting the response types. It was putting people off. It’s important online not to be seen to take yourself too seriously. Men engaged in online dating constantly say how unseriously they take life, as if that’s a good thing. I find it a complete turn-off, but then it’s evident that I have way too many opinions. Having considered the matter, I decided to persist with the accurate, off-putting version of myself. What’s likely to happen if you pretend to be someone else, and attract someone attracted to that imaginary woman? Exactly. It’s not going to end in bliss, is it? The best that could come out of it, it seems to me, is that it would end in a farce that was hilarious to tell other people about, but only ten years later when it ceased to be mortifying.

Jack set up his own dummy page on one of the sites, as an experiment and in the interests of data-collection, and reported back. He advised me not to look at the profiles of my competitors. Too many of them were pert, yoga-doing women with doctorates and waists. ‘There are, like, fifteen of them just in your postcode,’ he said. I decided to make a fake male profile and go and have a look for myself. Jack counselled against. ‘I wouldn’t go there. You’ll delete your page and join a monastery.’

‘A nunnery, you mean.’

‘A nunnery. Though a monastery would be more fun. In any case, how many women have ever looked at your profile, checking out the competition?’

‘None. Women don’t do that. Well, I thought there was one, but she turned out to be a transvestite. Women can’t see other women unless they do a same-sex search.’

‘Exactly. People would think you were secretly a lesbian. If they were secret lesbians too it could become a bit awkward all round.’

Jack had saved some of the profile pages written by skinny middle-aged Pilates-babes in my neighbourhood. The ones he judged successful had a winning combination of softness and steel. They showed a modest sense of achievement and ambition, but not too much. They referenced cultural phenomena that men can relate to (The Fast Show, Blackadder, Shawshank Redemption), and hinted that they had a ditsy side (‘I’m a modern girl, but I admit not great with fuseboxes!!’). They reassured men that they liked sex by using the dating site code-word cuddle (‘cuddles are my favourite thing, and I will look after you’), and they listed outdoor stuff – a passion for hills, skiing, scuba – under Hobbies and Interests. Being outdoorsy is important to lots of middle-aged men. ‘I don’t like to sit still too long,’ the men on dating sites said, over and over. ‘Life is for living and I’m looking for a woman to share the adventure with. No couch potatoes please.’ Perhaps it’s to do with being middle-aged, this insatiable quest for fitness: a sign that a man is resisting time as much as he can, and that he expects a future partner to have the same King Canute-like determination. It helped explain why some of the dismissal of a well-upholstered woman was so sharp and sneery.

A message arrived from Morocco.

‘I see you here tonight and I think you are very beautiful and clever,’ the message began. The sender was sturdy, bald and had a lovely smile. ‘I have a bold idea I would like to put you. I think we are ideal for match and I propose that I send you a ticket to coming to Tangier for a weekend to stay in my house and to have food with me.’ Another message arrived before I could reply. ‘I hope you do not think I am not genuine. I am very genuine.’ He sent references, scans of his diplomas, photographs of him with his children – they did all look very happy – and of his houses (a city one, and a country one with a pool). Half an hour later another message came, telling me more about his life, how I shouldn’t be put off by his being Muslim, how modern he was in his outlook and how international. He said he was aware that his English wasn’t the best, but that I should consider his many educational attainments. He was actually a great catch.

I sent a copy of his second email to Jack. ‘What’s the delay?’ was Jack’s only comment.

‘Casual dates not possible when they involve journeys to Tangier,’ I told him, stating the obvious.

‘It’s not because he’s five foot six and a bit plain, then.’

‘Height I admit is a factor.’

Height was a factor, but I wasn’t fixated on handsomeness. I like the idea of plainness, in fact; plainness is comforting when it’s a plain face that you love. And sometimes, people can become handsome in front of your eyes. Fall in love with someone’s mind and find it beautiful and their face might follow. It happens. I had a photograph of a snaggle-toothed ex-boyfriend on the laptop to remind me of this. What you don’t see in the picture is the power of his eyes, his magnetism, nor how interesting he was in conversation: how he could start to talk and hold a whole room spellbound. In person he was irresistible, but none of that was apparent in the photograph.

Another message arrived from Morocco. I could stay with his sister, my suitor said. She wanted to send me a note assuring me of her brother’s decency. I had to come to a decision and it came down to this: despite all enticements, was I really going to travel to Tangier for this date? No. I replied saying so, with regret, and my correspondent didn’t write again. This annoyed Jack. ‘You could at least have got a free holiday out of it,’ he said. ‘You reject people way too soon. You might have fallen for him. It would all have been a great adventure. You said you wanted an adventure. You could have had a nice life in Tangier.’

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘You wouldn’t have done it.’

‘Yes, I would,’ Jack said. ‘Like a bloody shot. But nobody ever asks.’

Simultaneously there was the question of Phil. I’d been trying out my policy of wooing by written word on someone I sort of knew. I hadn’t ever met him, but we were friends of friends, and so the meeting on the internet dating site might have been a bit embarrassing. He didn’t think it was, not at all, he said – or, rather, he wrote, because I never spoke to him or met him. Phil and I illustrated, at an early stage of the quest, the enormous danger of too much emailing. We started out in a pally way, comparing notes on our dating experience. By the second weekend, the messages from him had begun to emit a faint erotic charge. He thought we should meet, he said, but he was so busy. I was enjoying the frisson of email adoration too much to ask why we didn’t fix a date. He resisted making a date. He was up to his eyes in work (he was a lecturer). Instead, he kept writing, and I kept replying. When you live two miles from one another and could put down the laptop and put on your shoes and go and meet for lunch, but instead you confine yourselves to emailing, that’s actually a bit weird. The truth was that we treated each other as substitute people for those we had lost and couldn’t yet find; we had a synthetic kind of intimacy that made us both temporarily less sad. We didn’t admit to that, however. Phil just continued to be busy. And then he said he was muting himself on the dating site, for now, because he really was just too madly busy to have time for it, which was a clean way of ditching me, and I understood, and that was that. This was another lesson learned from internet dating: Lesson Two is that email relationships aren’t relationships. I wish I’d learned that one sooner. Or at all.

I decided not to send any more messages to academics. I suspected that many of them – despite talking the talk about equality, and how a certain age in women is tremendously sexy – nurtured a secret desire for a winsome 35-year-old and a second batch of children. There had also been, pre-Phil, a doomed dating site encounter with a man who lived so much in his head that he was barely sexual at all. He had that bloodless elongated look of a plant grown in the dark, someone who spent all their time indoors. He was looking for someone to talk to about Wagner, and was straightforward about being low-sexed. The highly educated male on the dating circuit is often a creature in need of elaborate mating rituals. Sometimes they are too diffident to suggest that an actual meeting takes place. Sometimes they give the impression of being too sensitive to have an erection. Perhaps, for some, continuous verbal sparring with someone of like mind is enough to achieve orgasm, though it might only express itself as a kind of juddering in the temporal lobes. I felt I needed someone a little more vital, someone who lived in their body more. Not Mellors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame, maybe – but someone with appetite.

Sex and Sensibility

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.