Стелла Грей – The Heartfix: An Online Dating Diary (страница 8)
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
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,
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
‘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
‘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 aren’t you taking a woman your own age out to dinner?’
‘Women my own age want marriage and babies. I don’t want marriage and babies.’
‘Ah.’
‘Meet me.’
‘Not now. But some time. Maybe.’
‘You like to play hard to get, then.’
‘Hard to get? We’ve barely said hello. Tell me more about yourself. Something. Anything.’
He didn’t reply, but for ages afterwards there were near-daily messages wanting to know how I was. I stopped responding, other than to ask him, twice, why he kept doing it: what was in it for him? He didn’t say. It was mystifying.
I had a chat with two friends who were also ‘listed’. (This was the shorthand we’d developed for discussing online dating. ‘Is X listed?’ ‘Yes, she’s been listed for over a year.’) One of them couldn’t help but be amused about my discussing ‘the search for the One’. ‘You don’t really think men are looking for the One, do you?’ she asked me. (She had become cynical by then.) ‘For most of them, sex with a lot of people and avoiding being in a couple is precisely the point of the exercise.’ According to her, men were treating these sites like a giant sweet shop, and were picking bagfuls of sweets. Some of them were tasting in order to whittle the choice to one, she conceded, but others had begun a bachelor life of new sweets every weekend, and had no intention of stopping for anyone. ‘Men see the sea of faces on dating sites and think, All these women are basically saying, “You can have sex with me if you want,” but I don’t think that’s what most of us are saying.’ The woman in the group who’d been dating the longest said she understood the male perspective. It wasn’t just men who were behaving that way. She was too. ‘I find I’m the same these days. I find someone nice but then I get drawn back in. There is always the possibility of someone better. It’s difficult to draw a line.’
Sometimes a Sunday was spent at home, trawling the listings in my pyjamas, sitting cross-legged and eating leftover Chinese takeaway (and every other food not nailed down in the fridge). It’s easy to become obsessive about the online dating search. It’s like the kind of feverishness that can grab you when you’ve sold one house and can’t find another. The process becomes compulsive, until eventually, inevitably, you begin to reconsider places that you put in the No pile. Hours could pass unnoticed in the time spent ‘just popping in’ to a dating site. I found myself scrolling through the hundreds of faces on screen, all of them saying (at least theoretically), ‘Talk to me; I’m here, I’m free, I’m looking for someone to love, and it might be you.’
But maybe not this one: ‘I like my independence but I’d also like a certain kind of female company on my days off.’ Or this one: ‘Living the dream working in a call centre, and need something to come home to other than existential despair.’ Though he received a comradely pat on the shoulder.
In online dating there is such a thing as a kind lie. It’s sent in response to an unwanted approach, as a sort of kindly meant shorthand. It’s a brush-off that’s politely worded, designed to avoid hurt. It avoids listing the nine reasons why you don’t want to have coffee. Usually I’d say something like, ‘I’ve just begun seeing someone and am only here checking my messages, but thank you, I was flattered, and good luck.’ In online dating, the kind lie is vital. I wish the men who use the sites understood this. I’d much rather be sent the kind lie than be ignored. Being ignored doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, not interested,’ so much as ‘You are beneath my notice.’ It says, ‘You’re not worth fifteen seconds of my life.’ It might also say, ‘At your age and non-thin, you need to lower your sights somewhat; please take my non-reply as a hint.’ These are not good thoughts to be sent swirling into the 3 a.m. insomnia of a person with flat-lining morale.