The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary. Stella Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 It wasn’t just my physical self that was being misrepresented in this lead-up, by the sending of out-of-date photographs.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 СКАЧАТЬ