The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary. Stella Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ him had begun to emit a faint erotic charge. He thought we should meet, he said, but he was so busy. I was enjoying the frisson of email adoration too much to ask why we didn’t fix a date. He resisted making a date. He was up to his eyes in work (he was a lecturer). Instead, he kept writing, and I kept replying. When you live two miles from one another and could put down the laptop and put on your shoes and go and meet for lunch, but instead you confine yourselves to emailing, that’s actually a bit weird. The truth was that we treated each other as substitute people for those we had lost and couldn’t yet find; we had a synthetic kind of intimacy that made us both temporarily less sad. We didn’t admit to that, however. Phil just continued to be busy. And then he said he was muting himself on the dating site, for now, because he really was just too madly busy to have time for it, which was a clean way of ditching me, and I understood, and that was that. This was another lesson learned from internet dating: Lesson Two is that email relationships aren’t relationships. I wish I’d learned that one sooner. Or at all.

      I decided not to send any more messages to academics. I suspected that many of them – despite talking the talk about equality, and how a certain age in women is tremendously sexy – nurtured a secret desire for a winsome 35-year-old and a second batch of children. There had also been, pre-Phil, a doomed dating site encounter with a man who lived so much in his head that he was barely sexual at all. He had that bloodless elongated look of a plant grown in the dark, someone who spent all their time indoors. He was looking for someone to talk to about Wagner, and was straightforward about being low-sexed. The highly educated male on the dating circuit is often a creature in need of elaborate mating rituals. Sometimes they are too diffident to suggest that an actual meeting takes place. Sometimes they give the impression of being too sensitive to have an erection. Perhaps, for some, continuous verbal sparring with someone of like mind is enough to achieve orgasm, though it might only express itself as a kind of juddering in the temporal lobes. I felt I needed someone a little more vital, someone who lived in their body more. Not Mellors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame, maybe – but someone with appetite.

Sex and Sensibility

      SUMMER, YEAR ONE

      One evening, walking the halls of a dating site, looking in doorways and finding other doors firmly closed to me, I began talking to a man called Oliver, who – if that really was him in the photograph – was six foot three and darkly handsome. He was also twenty years younger than me. Prior to his first message he’d looked at my profile almost every day for weeks, unaware or else unbothered that the site notches up each viewing. It got to the point that he’d visited twenty-three times. What’s he thinking? I asked myself each time he came back and looked at my page; what’s he deciding? Is it the picture? Is it my age? The alpha-control-freak intellectual-snob thing? Eventually there was a message.

      It said: ‘Hello, how are you?’

      This is lazy, as opening gambits go. It gives away nothing while asking for a lot, and is fundamentally unanswerable. What was he asking for – the news that my glands were up, that my bank balance was precarious, that I couldn’t find a novel I wanted to read next, and that I’d put on a swimsuit earlier that day and said, Oh God in heaven, no? I think what he really hoped for was: ‘Feeling horny, shall we meet at a Holiday Inn and screw?’ The best reply to the ‘How are you?’ query is equally bland and meaningless: ‘Fine thanks. You?’ That way, the ball goes back into his court. He was the one who initiated contact, after all. A dating site shouldn’t be a machine that men feed a pound coin into and that delivers entertainment down a chute.

      What I did instead, because I was bored, was tell him exactly how I was. It took five paragraphs and a lot of rewrites. At the end of my answer I asked how he was. He didn’t reply. I couldn’t believe it. I’d done it again.

      So the next evening when he asked how I was tonight, instead of saying, ‘Fine thanks, you?’ I sent him an even longer answer, with reference to meals eaten, energy levels, lengths swum, the working day and the outrageous cost of a Fry’s chocolate cream at the corner shop: 80p! That’s 16 shillings! (He took my quaint shilling talk in his stride, perhaps aware that it was intended to emphasise our age difference.) I asked him how his day had gone. There was no response.

      The next day there he was again. ‘How are you today?’

      ‘I could tell you,’ I wrote, ‘but what’s the point? You never talk back.’

      ‘You’re very attractive, do you want to meet for dinner?’ he answered. ‘Tonight?’

      I said I couldn’t, sorry. And besides I’d already eaten. (I hadn’t. It was a lie.)

      ‘So what are you doing now?’ he typed.

      ‘Sprawled on the sofa with a book,’ I wrote, unguardedly.

      ‘Mmm. I like the idea of you sprawled.’

      ‘Ha,’ I typed back, completely unnerved. ‘But you are way too young for me.’

      ‘Girls bore me,’ he wrote. ‘I’m more interested in women, real women like you. Looking forward to our first date. Saturday?’

      ‘I can’t this week,’ I replied. I was sure that Oliver would take one look at me and run, which was a pity, because in many respects he was absolutely what the doctor would have ordered, if the doctor was a middle-aged woman who hadn’t had sex for quite a while. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ I said. It wasn’t even that I was interested in him. But I was determined to win this one. Online dating can be gladiatorial and I was determined not to be one of the Christians, munched up by a suave and smarmy lion.

      ‘You can find out all about me over dinner,’ he wrote.

      The next day, there he was again. ‘How are you tonight?’ he asked.

      Fine, thanks, I said. I left it at that.

      He responded in real time, in twenty seconds – we were now having a real-time conversation on the screen. He wrote: ‘When we go to dinner, will you be wearing a skirt?’

      ‘Probably, or a dress. Why?’

      ‘Will it be short?’

      ‘Unlikely.’

      ‘Will you wear stockings, so I can put my hand under your skirt as we’re having a drink?’

      ‘That’s forward.’

      ‘I bet you have gorgeous long legs. Are they long?’

      ‘Not really,’ I lied. I am way out of my depth here, I thought.

      ‘And will you wear heels?’

      ‘Probably not. I might wear heeled boots.’

      ‘Wear heels, a short skirt and stockings, just for me.’

      ‘Oliver, I’m not really a heels and stockings kind of a woman,’ I wrote. ‘To be honest, I get kind of sick of all these clichés of femininity.’ I knew this reply broke one of the iron laws of online dating – pomposity! – but I was sick of them.

      ‘I have total respect for that,’ Oliver wrote. ‘It’s a good point.’

      A thirty-second silence fell, while I contemplated his response, and he contemplated it also. I broke the silence. ‘Why СКАЧАТЬ