The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary

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.’