The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary

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.