The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary. Stella Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ looking for and our ideas about the future. We didn’t reveal our real identities or email addresses. We didn’t speak on the phone, or see each other talking on Skype. It was a connection built – and then dismantled – entirely by typing.

      After a few days, Alexander wrote a very long message in the middle of the night, listing all the women he’d ever loved and how they’d let him down. Dates were supplied and first names, and vivid descriptions. He was 55, and his second marriage had come to an end in the spring. It failed, he said, because the children were too much; he’d realised he couldn’t handle living with young children. He’d moved out and left his wife to handle them alone, other than for a weekend a month, when he took them to the zoo, like an uncle. He wrote that he was looking for someone who would make him feel more rewarded by life than his wife had. As time went on, that sentence bothered me more and more.

      There are men who will take on the role of therapist and draw you out, who’ll draw it all out of you like knotted silk handkerchiefs from a magician’s pocket. This feels wonderful at the time. It’s only afterwards that you might look back and shudder. There are people who get a kick out of owning other people; some people own others by knowing their secrets. Some men want to engage in the dance, and some men only want you to dance, while they watch you. ‘Tell me all about your past relationships and what went wrong,’ he wrote, at the end of his own exhaustive list, and, feeling pent up, feeling the thrill of letting loose and being listened to, I did. Alexander, a man I had known for less than a week, disagreed with my analysis. ‘It’s obvious to me that your ex never loved you,’ he wrote. ‘I’m beginning to see that lots of people end up married to people they don’t love, though it can take them a long time to admit to it. Adultery is often the beginning of a search for something more real, and the sex is just a smokescreen. I realise that’s been my own pattern.’

      When I tried to bring the conversation to an end, Alexander became even more assertive. He said he’d taken the red pill. Dating sites are awash with men talking about the blue pill and the red pill. It’s a frame of reference taken from The Matrix: if you’ve ‘taken the blue pill’ you’re someone who doesn’t want to face reality, happy to live in your illusions, while if you’ve ‘taken the red pill’ you see the world as it really is. (You think.) Among those who claim to have ‘taken the red pill’ are men who’ve gone through a bad divorce and know all about women, how we think and why, how men behave and why: it’s all become clear to them. I told Alexander that he didn’t really know me. He disagreed. He’d come across my situation a hundred times. It was the way of things, he said. I had my first serious case of dating site revulsion. Why had I said any of what I’d said to him, and told him my history, this arrogant stranger? Though I didn’t write that. I wrote that it had been nice talking to him, and that I wished him luck. His reply said: ‘I could say that I’d be back to talk to you at a later date, like all the other arseholes, but as you’ve already gathered, I won’t be contacting you again because it’s already clear you can’t give me what I need. This isn’t what I need at this stage of my life.’ Everywhere I looked there were people who’d hit middle age and were talking about stages in their lives.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ