Heartfix, The Read online

  First Bites and Backbites

  SPRING, YEAR ONE

  So, the plan was to make a man fall a little bit in love with me by email before we met. The idea was that this would make me feel less nervous about meeting a stranger.

  The project didn’t start well. The first attempt was utterly doomed, because the man in question wasn’t a communicator. To Ralph, texting was for making social arrangements, and emailing was for making more long-winded social arrangements, and he didn’t grasp that both could be used as a form of foreplay. I’m not saying this was a bad thing, per se. Each to their own. But yes, Ralph and I were a mismatch, in this and in other ways. I persisted, though, for five weeks and seven dates, because he was an incredible kisser. We’re talking world-class osculation. It was the kind of kissing that could turn a person’s head and make them conclude, totally wrongly, that a lifetime of bliss lay ahead. Sex (sixth and seventh dates) was a complete disaster, though. I don’t mean that the mechanics of it were a failure, despite the fact that I was undoubtedly a nervous wreck. It was just unsexy: weirdly, profoundly unsexy for both of us. It was odd. The kissing was our sex. The kissing was as erotic as hell. The sex, however, was more like shaking hands with your bottom.

  I did wonder if Ralph had an aversion to body hair. There were men, in this story, who were enthusiastic about ‘a seventies vibe’ and there were men who had to stifle a shriek. There was a man who asked, flat out (via the messaging system) if I shaved, and who was angered by my response; my having pubic hair of any kind was rude to him, he thought, like being unshowered. The best sort of men are those who don’t give a shit how much hair you have, or where. (Listen, chaps – try having your pubes ripped out with hot wax, on a regular ‘maintenance’ basis, before declaring a preference.)

  So, things didn’t work out with Ralph. For him, perhaps it was that I didn’t have the pudendum of a 10-year-old girl. For me, it was his lack of interest in talking when we were apart that killed the urge to keep trying. He was perfectly friendly when we were face to face, but terse or silent between dates. A goldfish, in online dating terms. Often he ignored texts and emails, and if he replied at all it was usually three words, using his catchphrase: ‘Catch you later!’ I sent him an email one night telling him about a bad day, and his reply was: ‘Looking forward to catching you soon!’ I’m sorry if this sounds needy, but I needed more. Six words seemed like they might indicate a lack of interest.

  Not that I could make claims to be the norm from which Ralph was deviating. Ralph had no way of knowing that I was emotionally rather catlike in needing frequent small meals of love. He had unwittingly stepped into a game in which he wasn’t really aware of the rules. I texted him after date number six, asking if we were still on for Friday. ‘Yes! Looking forward to catching up with you!’ the reply said. He’d signed it with his full name, including his surname. Who writes their surname on a text? Did he think I’d need to distinguish him from all the other Ralphs I was seeing?

  So, date number seven came, and we had our romantic dinner, in candlelight, and talked about work. It was a dull evening – to be honest they had all been dull – but I was determined not to give up. There was the kissing to consider. There was the whole ‘having a boyfriend at last’ thing to consider, too. I’m not by nature a quitter. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘do you think … could we talk a bit more, between dates, so that we’re a bit more in touch with the day-to-day, what’s happening and what we’re thinking? I’d enjoy that.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, scrutinising the wine list.

  We had weird unsexy sex, and later on, back at home, having soaked in the bath, naked in fresh crisp sheets, I texted him saying that I was warm and naked in bed, just bathed, feeling restless and thinking of him. He didn’t reply. The following night, having turned out my light, I texted that I was thinking of him. That was all I said: ‘Thinking of you.’ The response was: ‘You take care!’ (Seriously. Really.)

  It occurred to me that I frightened Ralph. Ralph was scared. It began to look, at the very least, like an unusually short attention span. Whatever the actual diagnosis, I knew it wasn’t going to last even a week longer. I needed romance, of some sort, some sense of a progression, some inkling of a relationship. I needed more than a fuck-buddy who didn’t want a friend. And that’s why I went quiet. I stopped texting and emailing, leaving a vacuum, to see what Ralph would fill it with. Ralph didn’t fill it with anything. It was easy come easy go, and it came and it went. Nothing was put to an end because essentially nothing had begun. He wasn’t in touch again, and that was that. It was as if the whole thing had been a hallucination.

  I did start to wonder, at that early point, if a middle-aged woman on a dating site might be considered as really only useful as a fuck-buddy. I did wonder if men assumed I would know that, and that I’d take what I could get. I didn’t get a lot of messages unless I’d written first, and those I did receive tended to be only a notch beyond grunting. ‘How About It Darlin, You and Me? Xxxxxxxx’ There are plenty of men online who think a woman over 45 will react to the offer of a shag in an alley with tears of gratitude.

  Men online use kisses, all the time; perhaps they picked up the habit on social media, where women who don’t know each other and will never meet have developed intricate hierarchies of kissing. This is a cultural shift. I’m sure men never used to scatter kisses so freely. Plus, a new function enabling people to send mass mail-outs had been introduced on one of the sites, which some men took to eagerly. It meant that they could write one message and press EMAIL ALL and have it sent to every woman they’d ticked. One such that I received acknowledged that it was a mass communication, as if that wouldn’t put us all off him, at all. ‘Hello ladies, this is Pete, I’m an average guy, like a laugh, like sofa and the telly, like my footie, like to make a lady happy, so let me know if any of you would like to take a chance on a 45 year old man: one careful owner, reasonable bodywork for age, full service history.’ Another had used the mail-out facility to get a lively competitive vibe going. He’d set us all an essay question. He wanted submissions in reply to the following: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ It wasn’t clear what the prize was.

  Other messages were misdelivered. An email arrived from a man in South Wales. ‘Jessica,’ it said, ‘I knew the minute I saw your face that it was meant to be. Do you believe in love at first sight? I’m visited by intuition that I am the man for you. Send me a long message telling me all about yourself, and I’ll reply by tonight, and we can get this thing started.’

  ‘You’ve sent this to the wrong person,’ I replied. ‘I’m not Jessica. I’m afraid this is the hazard of using cut-and-paste.’

  ‘You’re the right person,’ he insisted, styling it out. ‘I’m just not very good with names.’

  After this I had daily on-screen dating site conversations with a man called Alexander. He was Dutch in origin, six foot four and the kind of blond that takes grey well, and looked good in his photograph, in dark jeans and jacket and a white shirt, with a big brown satchel hooked across his body, and a floral scarf. He was unmistakably not from around here. We met first on a Sunday. Well, we didn’t really meet. All we had to go on were photographs and the usual clues: carefully veiled descriptions of who we are and where we work; our likes and dislikes; our favourite films, books, music, food, places in the world; what we’re 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 hand
le 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 oneline 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 didn’t find it reassuring at all. They preferred women who’d ditched men and were now about to choose them in preference. The spectacle of a dumped woman seemed to trigger something, curiosity and then a rush to judgement, disguised inside a series of questions. There was worry about taking on a woman another man had discarded. ‘What did you do to get dumped? Are you a bitch?’ I mentioned this in an on-screen chat one evening with a man called Neville, and asked what he thought.

  ‘You may as well give up now,’ he wrote, ‘and withdraw from here and save your money.’ I asked him what he meant. ‘It’s porn that’s your problem,’ he told me. ‘Now that por
n is normal, now that it’s normal to look at porn online, that’s the downfall of the middle-aged woman. Men are convinced that if they become bachelors again, that’s the kind of sex life they’ll get. Young women, big tits, flat stomachs, a tight fit where it matters. There are loads of gorgeous young things here who’d be happy with a 50-year-old sugar daddy. You can’t compete with that.’

  The question of competition kept coming up. I’d spent most of my life not fretting too much about whether men approved of me, but now I was having to resist scrutinising myself as if through their imagined eyes. I had flashes of self-disgust about the fact that I was so tall, and so big-boned and well-upholstered, and had such big feet. My waist had thickened and How was I going to compete? It was deeply disconcerting. I hadn’t ever seen myself like that, as someone not physically good enough to be loved.

  Not having seen profiles written by other women (only women seeking a female partner see them), it was hard to know what the norm was, and how far I deviated from the average. I mentioned this to my friend Jack. Together we went in to my page and blitzed every one of the errors he identified: being whiney, being needy, being pompous and self-aggrandising (that hurt), overly conventional (Radio 4 was tussled over; I won) and too bookish. The argument that it was best to be myself cut little ice. Despite his efforts, despite adding baking, Sundays in London parks, gigs and beer to the list of things I like, I was still, Jack complained, all too evidently an alpha control freak and raging intellectual snob. That was limiting the response types. It was putting people off. It’s important online not to be seen to take yourself too seriously. Men engaged in online dating constantly say how unseriously they take life, as if that’s a good thing. I find it a complete turn-off, but then it’s evident that I have way too many opinions. Having considered the matter, I decided to persist with the accurate, off-putting version of myself. What’s likely to happen if you pretend to be someone else, and attract someone attracted to that imaginary woman? Exactly. It’s not going to end in bliss, is it? The best that could come out of it, it seems to me, is that it would end in a farce that was hilarious to tell other people about, but only ten years later when it ceased to be mortifying.