The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary. Stella Grey

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ