Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 10

  I was almost contacted by one of those jet-set types at one point. Almost, but not quite. He was the senior version, in his mid-sixties, widowed and keen to remarry. He’d got a little jowly but you could see he’d been formidably handsome once. He enthused about having an interesting job that he loved, a creative role in international business. Although he refused to retire completely, he was winding down and was keen to find a woman to go exploring with. There was obviously plenty of cash for this—his house was vast and exquisite, his suits bespoke: in short, he was completely intimidating. (And no, I wasn’t after someone with a heap of money; I’d have found the disparity between their life and mine, their normal and mine, tricky to handle.) More out of boredom than anything, I filled in his questionnaire—the site offered these as standard kit—and was awarded a score: I’d answered twenty out of twenty questions as he’d have hoped. I sent him an email and was ignored. A few days later he came and had a look at my profile. He looked three times that day, twice the next. Then he filled in my own questionnaire (the site allowed you to come up with your own Yes/No questions) and got twenty out of twenty too. I sent a one-line note. “We seem to be highly compatible. Would you like to meet?” No answer, though he came and looked at my profile again.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Jack on the phone. “Is it that ‘I’d never date a woman who asked me out’ thing again? Like we’re all at a ball and it’s 1825?”

  It might be, he conceded. “These men want to do the chasing, and they want to be with submissive women, and be in charge. Plus, they want a woman who will look good in a bikini or an evening dress.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked him.

  I was spending far too much time with my dog, and indoors, man-trawling. I went to the window and looked out at the street. “I have got to get out there and dazzle somebody, pdq,” I said. “Okay, well maybe not dazzle them. I could find a way to pique someone’s interest, though, given enough props, I’m sure. Perhaps I should get a unicycle, or learn the saxophone and play it outside Zara, wearing a Kiss Me Quick hat. Maybe I could become one of those huggers who offer free hugs on street corners, and then I could hold on very tightly to the handsome tall ones. Maybe I could give out my number on the street like one of those flyer-guys offering vouchers for discount golf clubs. Maybe I could set some kind of a trap, and then they’d fall in love with me while I was tending to their wounds.” The dog looked concerned. It was true it was all getting a little bit Kathy Bates in Misery.

  When you’re single and don’t want to be, there’s a constant background chorus of advice. It was generally agreed that I needed, in the dread phrase, to get out there. Very few people knew that I was having relationships with people online; they interpreted my staying at home night after night in an old-world way as being alone. People don’t realize that online dating isn’t just about being asked out: many of the dates start and end online, with typed words on screens, and never even make it to Starbucks.

  I longed to meet someone in the old-fashioned way, but I had no idea how to put the plan into action. I’d already asked married pals if they had personable single friends, and had drawn a blank. When I told my mum I was abandoning online dating and going out to find men in the city, she clapped her hands in rejoicing. She thought there was—somehow, don’t ask me how—a qualitative difference, as if finding a man online would be like finding one at Aldi. Real-world men were bound to be better quality, she thought. My mother, like many of my friends (and all too many dating gurus), had advised the joining of societies in order to meet men. Get out into the world and meet people in the old-fashioned way, they said, the fools. Generally I spared them the sad litany of failures to instigate chat in bookshops and delicatessens and with men in parks, letting my dog meet their dog. I didn’t even know if I wanted to go back to that kind of happenstance. Online dating at its best sends you to meet-ups fully informed. I’d grown accustomed to the data sets. I’d grown used to self-descriptions, stated likes and dislikes, the lists of places on the to-do list, the things hoped for and feared, the all-round self-revealing that goes on in a properly filled-out profile page. Little is known about a stranger who asks you out while your terriers say hello to one another beside a shrubbery after five minutes of dog chat. You can’t really subject them to the standard questions. You can’t go barging in to their private lives, gung ho. So, are you married? Oh—single, really, that’s interesting, and what are you hoping for, from a relationship, something long term? When you’re used to the online way of doing things, accidental first meetings offer so little of people upfront, as facts. When you meet online, it isn’t usually going to take until the third date to discover that someone is a Scientologist or a conspiracy theorist, or that he has nine children.

  But there was no doubt that it wasn’t working out as well as it might. “This internet shenanigans is all very well,” my mother had already told me, trying to be modern, “but real-world socializing has to be better.” Whether she was right or not, this wasn’t really helping. “There must be a nice dance you can go to” was her follow-up suggestion (not showing her age at all). The trouble was that I’d already tried singles-oriented real-world socializing, and I could only attempt it a second time if I pretended the first time hadn’t happened. I’d done the joining-societies thing; I’d become a Gallery Friend and had been to public lectures. Nothing doing. “Just talk to people while you’re out and about,” Mum urged me. She is an inveterate talker-to-everyone, but then she’s eighty and is indulged. There were sometimes attractive middle-aged men in the café where I’d take a book to lunch, and I’d look at them out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge whether they were attached. Twice, I’d seen faces I knew from dating sites, both of them staunch non-repliers, and had been half tempted to humiliate them in front of their peers, citing their offhand rejections, but who needs that kind of trouble? Members of the Works from Home crowd also hung out at the café, in their jeans and pinstripe shirts, with their tiny laptops and mysterious folders of papers. Our eyes met occasionally, and sometimes for a second or third time, but then they’d finish their coffee and leave. How can a conversation start in those circumstances that isn’t embarrassing or obvious? The last thing I needed was to become known as a predatory woman (cougar, I think, is the charming word used) prowling about in her local coffee place, growling at men and making a tit of herself.

  I’d tried the real-world pickup, for want of a better phrase. I’d humiliated myself in wine shops, rushing in, sidling up to nice-looking men and talking to them about vins de pays we might buy. They’d bought their wine and had then gone home. I’d tried to initiate chat with men who stopped off in the railway station food hall at six o’clock, as they stood in front of the Meals for One section. I’d done this in an early phase, post-separation, when my mental health wasn’t the best. In my head I was someone else. I was twenty-eight again. I could see her, the slender striking-looking dark-haired girl, in the falsely reflecting mirror behind my eyes. This is what I wrote, on the second page of the dating diary: “At twenty-eight I was flirted with on an ongoing basis, by men older and younger. At twenty-eight you don’t see yourself at fifty, thickening in the waist and loosening around the throat. It doesn’t occur to you that those same men who ogled you at the office, back then, would run a mile if they met you now, even though they’re all older than you.”

  The next time I went to said coffee shop, I witnessed an attempt at a real-world pickup. A man in his late fifties, lanky in Levi’s, began to talk to a pretty woman of about thirty who was sitting opposite him. She was doing a Sudoku in a newspaper.

  “How are you getting on with that?” he asked. That was his opening gambit. He was being friendly and introducing a topic of conversation, at the same time as signaling his interest. Easy.

  “I seem to be stuck on this one, but it’s a Super-Fiendish,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh, I love those,” he said, coming across from his seat so that he could look at
it too, sitting beside her almost knee to knee. I was amazed at his smoothness. She let him talk her through it and said his method was going to be invaluable for future attempts. If only he’d stopped there! To the wide-eyed horror of all around us, he began to test her on various mathematical problems, putting them to her verbally and talking her through them. When she understood something he told her she was smart, and sounded surprised about it. “Hey! You’re really smart!” He started explaining what prime numbers are, and when she interrupted to say she knew, he talked over her. “Wait, listen to what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. Then he made his move, unaware it was already too late. “Could we talk about this more over dinner?” She politely declined, and when she’d left he picked up the newspaper and didn’t seem too disheartened.

  There were lessons to be learned, I reflected. We could call this Lesson Four. Lesson Four is: be openly interested, be unashamedly yourself, be bold, and try not to give it another thought when it all comes to nothing. Perhaps not so patronizing as Levi’s Man, but bold. Boldness. Who dares wins, and all that. Yes.

  A man with shaggy dark hair, Heathcliff-handsome, came and sat opposite me and opened his copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude. He had his back to the corner, and every few minutes he scanned the room from over the top of the novel. Noticing I was looking, he began to glance at me, though only when I appeared to be absorbed by my own book. Do not read too much into this, I told myself. He might be one of the high-prestige lords of online dating, the ones who never reply unless you meet their stringent criteria. He might not be glancing at you at all. He might be thinking about Gabriel García Márquez, and not even seeing you. He might be thinking about his shed, or about his wife Claire, so young that she’s still at university. He might be wondering if you are Claire’s mother’s dumpy friend Janet, and if he should say hello.

  Follow Sudoku man’s advice and ask what the book’s like and say you have it but have never got around to reading it, my helpful inner voice suggested. The man was sitting eight feet away, and was continuing to glance at me. Why couldn’t I just ask the question? He might think me forward, desperate, perhaps an unusual sort of hooker, or someone preparing to talk him into a cult or a Ponzi scheme, but so what? I opened my mouth and closed it again, unable to speak, and he drank his coffee down and was gone.

  Next, a dating site email arrived from Jim, who was apparently unaware that we saw each other in our neighborhood sometimes. In fact, Jim (I thought, looking at his photograph), I saw you at the weekend, when I was buying flowers and you were buying avocados. He was undoubtedly dashing—a blond, square-jawed man who was aging well. He worked for a legal outfit and was heavily into snorkeling. He had the sleek, wide-shouldered, slim-hipped body of the keen swimmer. You name a turquoise sea and he’d snorkeled there. (I hate being underwater, as it happens, but thought it best not to mention this until after the wedding.) He was a fulfilled, happy person, his bio said. He had everything he wanted in life, other than someone to love. He wasn’t a player, he made a point of saying; he was one of the good guys. He found that dating sites were getting increasingly sleazy, he added.

  I agreed enthusiastically to his suggestion that we meet for a drink. I wondered about mentioning that we seemed to live in the same district, but decided against. I did say that I was finding dating sites increasingly sleazy also. He wanted very much to fall deeply in love with someone, he said in his response, and stay there, deeply in love for the rest of his life, in a marriage like that of his parents. He’d always prized his freedom above everything, he said, but recently he’d begun to think differently about his life. He saw his freedom now as a series of dunderheaded missed opportunities. There were women who had loved him and whom he’d turned away, afraid of commitment and staleness, afraid that love would end. He hadn’t allowed himself to get too dependent on anyone, his whole life. He despised the whole dating site culture of one-night stands, he wrote, and short-term relationships and lack of emotional ambition.

  We arranged to meet on Friday night, at a bar near his flat. I didn’t mention that it was also near mine. He suggested the venue. He said, “Let’s make it after 9 p.m., as I have a meeting there at 7.” I told him nine o’clock was ideal. Once the date was arranged I went back and looked properly at his profile, and that’s when I noticed something I hadn’t before: that Jim was hoping to have children. I messaged him. “You know that I’m fifty, don’t you? Children aren’t in the cards. Still want to meet?”

  “It’s probably not a goer long term,” he replied, “but how do you feel about short-term fun?” Short-term fun? Wasn’t this the man who was casual-sex-averse? “Give me your mobile number and I’ll text you when my meeting’s over,” he said. “Should be by 9 but might overrun.”

  Intuition struck me like a gong. “Wait—do you have a date at 7? Is that what the meeting is?”

  That’s precisely what it was. “It was arranged before I met you,” he protested. “And I’m not one for canceling arrangements at the last minute.”

  I got dolled up, in a silver and black dress, with long silver earrings and gray heels. I was having a date! Finally, an actual no-expectations date. I waited and waited, and checked and re-checked my phone, and when it got to 10:30 I took off the dress and the makeup and went to bed. At 10:55 the phone beeped. “Fancy a drink?”

  “How did your date go?” I texted back.

  “Unexpectedly well,” he admitted. “Lovely snog at the bus stop. Are you up for another?”

  The following day there was another Jim, a tanned and muscly builder, wanting to know if he could have my phone number. “I love your profile,” he wrote. “I barely read at all but I do like a woman who does.” (No, I had not simplified my listing. Quite the reverse. There were something like thirty books mentioned on it at this point.) I gave him my number and he rang while I was walking along the street, just as it was getting dark.

  “Well, this is weird, isn’t it?” he said when I answered. He had a nice Yorkshire accent.

  “It is a bit weird,” I agreed. “How are you, what have you been doing?” I sat myself on a bench to talk to him.

  “Busy day at work, just had a shower, just opened a beer, putting my feet up. You?”

  “The same, though I haven’t quite got to the beer and feet up stage yet. Looking forward to that.”

  “You sound way too posh for the likes of me,” he said. (Posh? I’m not posh remotely. It’s just that I don’t have much of any sort of accent.) “So what are you wearing?” he asked me.

  “Tweed skirt, T-shirt, jacket, boots,” I told him.

  “Kinky,” he said. (It wasn’t, I promise you. It was firmly on the spectrum of frumpy.) “How short is the skirt? Tell me about the boots. Are you wearing stockings? I’m getting hard just thinking about it.”

  “The skirt’s mid-calf and a bit dowdy; I’m altogether a bit dowdy,” I told him.

  “Tell me about your nipples,” he said. “What size are they?”

  I had to catch my breath. How did this suddenly become a topic? “Really?” I said. “Seriously? I have to go. Bye.”

  “Jim” had only posted one photograph and on revisiting it I was suspicious of the studio-quality lighting. Was Jim the man in the picture? Maybe. Maybe not. I was beginning to be skeptical about too-good dating site photographs, especially since realizing, on an earlier foray into the listings, that a man who’d posted a stylish picture of himself in a black raincoat at the Trevi Fountain had lifted it from a clothing catalogue.

  As it’s easy to change the illustrations that we post in order to market ourselves on dating sites, I decided, experimentally, to swap mine for radically different ones, to see what happened. My pictures thus far hadn’t shown even a hint of cleavage. They’re what I’d call Girl Next Door Grown Up—I’m fond of a chunky jumper, a long full skirt, boots, big jewelry. I dress in the general style of what my pal Jack calls “fifty-year-old headmistress of a progressive girls’ school.” On a good day, I might be thought to be
the art teacher there, rocking her vintage Liberty boho look, though usually I’m distinctly more “Dressed randomly by the Marks & Spencer sale.” I’m not always glad of Jack’s take on things but he can be relied upon not to gild the lily, and sometimes I need that inability to lily-gild.

  So I hunted through my camera files and found the perfect shot. It had been taken at a black tie do five years before, and featured a silky black frock with a low neckline, smoky eyes, scarlet lips, a bit of a come-get-me expression and lighting so flattering as to render me unrecognizable. Bingo. I went to one of the sites and posted the photograph, and sat back and waited. Within seconds, men were clicking on the photograph in order to look at my profile page, and—more to the point, I suspect—to look at that photograph at full size. My visitor numbers immediately shot up, and began to accelerate in a crazy way. “You’ll get a lot of attention if you do this,” Jack had said, and Jack was right.

  Intrigued, I went across to another dating site and changed the photograph there, from the jumper shot to the cleavage one. I’d been getting about ten views a week, but when I went back half an hour later I’d already had sixty-three. Messages began to arrive that said, in short, in ways both innocuous and presumptuous, that they liked the new me. Among the approving responses there were explicit descriptions of what some of them were doing with the picture, and many invitations to Skype sex. I didn’t get dates, though. No lunch offers. No offers of actual non-leg-over meetings.

  I wondered what response I’d get if I signed up at a new website and used this as the only photograph. So that’s what I did: I joined a free dating site, and got twenty-seven responses in twenty-four hours. I was fresh meat there, delivered to the waiting wolves. None of the wolves’ messages was conversational; none talked to me as a person; perhaps I’d removed the need to talk to me as a person by appearing to set the agenda myself. After forty-eight hours I had over a hundred responses, most of them one-line stuff: “Mmm great tits, howsabout we get together xxx.” Some were much longer than that and detailed, and had phone snaps attached. I deleted the account and opened another one, giving myself a new name. I used a different picture, one taken when I was forty and looked a lot younger, and was as wholesome as you like, in a field in a Fair Isle sweater. I didn’t fill in the blank fields about achievements and interests, but let the picture speak for itself. By that evening there were several serious approach emails of respectful tone, requesting the pleasure of my company over lunch. None, however, was from a man within 200 miles, aside from one that was complimentary about my being a real lady who didn’t wear muck on her face.