Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 21

  Late on the first night I got a text from Bill, just as I was nodding off, asking if I wanted to talk. He couldn’t sleep, he said, and, strange though it was to say, he was missing me. This is one of the gifts of the internet revolution. You don’t need to have met someone physically in the same three-dimensional space to feel that you know them, and like them, and have admitted them to the tribe of your people.

  In the morning when I checked my phone, I discovered that I’d had an email from Bill at just after 2 a.m. He was still awake, he wrote, and he was imagining I was there with him. He’d become aware of my turning and coming to lie right behind him. I’d kissed his neck. He’d felt the soft press of my breasts on his back. He’d arched himself and half woken, feeling the flush of desire. He’d turned and kissed me. He’d taken my hand and put it gently over his hard balls. He’d run his own hand down over my lower back and arse, and then between my thighs . . . It was quite difficult to concentrate on what Anna was saying, over breakfast.

  I know of two women—successful, midlife, single women—who have what one of them calls digital boyfriends. Friend A, the one who has met the man in question, told me, “It’s like we’re married; we talk about our days, what to have for dinner, what film to watch afterwards, as if we’re together on the sofa. We’re together on the sofa via a phone line.” Friend B (who hasn’t met hers) told me that her man was invaluable for help with ringmain fuse catastrophes, and IT advice. “He’s like my own personal help desk,” she told me perkily. “That, and very steamy late-night sexy time, baby.”

  “How do you know that it’s mutual, the way you think of these sessions?” I asked her. “How do you know that these Skype sexploits aren’t making you into a phone sex worker that he doesn’t have to pay?” (This question had bothered me a bit.)

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she said. “He’s a nice guy. Besides, you could say that about all relationships, really.” Is there a script, I asked her—I don’t mean an actual script, but are the things you say to one another more or less the same every night? She said that was true; they’d found what worked for them. “And of course,” she added, “we can do it four times in a row, in nine different positions, if we feel like it, because we can talk it, even if we can’t do it.”

  Perhaps I should add that I’ve never met Friend A or Friend B. I got to know both of them via Twitter. A case can be made that digital love has a lot in common with friendships entirely played out on social media. Asking if phone-based romances are real isn’t that different from asking if social media friendships are authentic or not. It’s quite difficult to argue that they’re not.

  A relationship that goes on only at a distance might be a lie, but it’s an easy and delicious lie, and has built-in safety mechanisms. If Bill and I never met, we couldn’t really separate. If we didn’t risk physical sex we couldn’t fail at it. Despite never meeting we became intimate, and got to know each other’s preferences in bed. It reached the point where we could make each other climax from a standing start in ten minutes flat. I was a train and he was a volcano. He’d work himself up to a pitch and demand to see me soon, in the real world, insisting that we had to meet, and then he’d have an orgasm—boom—and let the subject drop. I let the subject drop too. I didn’t have any feelings about being used or about using someone, because we both chose to be in the bubble. It was fun, and mutually supportive, and that was all. We avoided having contact on Skype. I didn’t want to, and not just for my own Skype-historical reasons. I can’t speak for Bill, but in my case it was because that eye-to-eye contact is too persuasively but synthetically real. So much is said by the eyes. So much might be revealed, or let slip; so much might prove to be lacking.

  We had the ending-things conversation during the final evening of the seaside break. It was just before 1 a.m. and I was sitting up in my cottage bed as I spoke to him, so I could see out of the big rear window. I was looking out at the dark sky, the black sea, the lights around the bay. “I don’t think we’re going to meet, are we?” I said. “Neither of us thinks this situation will be improved by meeting.”

  “Probably not,” he said; “it’s been spectacular, but either we’d see that we peaked on the phone, or we’d meet a few times and then we’d have to face up to the fact that neither of us really wants a distance relationship.”

  “That being the case I think this is the last time we do this,” I told him.

  “Oh God,” he said, “you’re breaking up with me! You’re not even doing it face to face!” We both laughed at this. “I agree,” he said. “I’m sad but I agree.” It was time to break up, even though we weren’t really together.

  And so I was properly single again. After a longish period of not investing much in dating site chatter, preoccupied by Andrew and then by Bill, it was disheartening to go back into the fray. It was almost nostalgically like the old days of eighteen months before, when there was wave after wave of mostly sex-oriented approaches. Something else that was immediately noticeable was a tweaking of the status categories. At one site, when I returned to it, there was a new box to tick, to add to the usual Married, Single, Divorced, Separated, and it was “Seeing Someone.” In other words, shopping for something better than I have. It is a category for those addicted to the constantly replenishing supply, and who, to put it in executive terms, are looking to get an upgrade.

  A blandly blondly handsome, 1960s-styled man of thirty-five (thick dark-framed glasses, extreme side parting) messaged asking for my number. I told him I didn’t give my number unless I felt that trust had been established. Tell me more about yourself, I said. No, let’s just skip the niceties and get to the sex, he replied. What’s your real name? I asked him. Lars, he said (I bet it wasn’t). He wouldn’t give me his surname. We had a pointless message argument about why I wouldn’t meet a surname-less man for a drink. Let’s skip the drink and go straight to bed, he wrote: I’ll give you my address, how’s that, and you can get a cab and come over. Wear a fur coat if you have one. Skip the underwear.

  The day got worse. I’d had an offer of marriage from a man I’d not yet spoken to, on the basis that we could change our minds after meeting. Kevin explained that he just wanted me to know that he was serious about the long term. He made his living by buying flats, putting cheap furniture in them, then letting them at as high a price as possible to people on benefits. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t attracted into this orbit. When I didn’t want to meet him, his parting shot was to send a picture of his erection. At least he claimed it was his. It’s difficult to say if it was intended to be appetizing or to punish. I’m pretty sure that—at least in some cases—the sending of dick pics expresses a bizarre sort of hostility. It’s a mystery but it’s possible that it’s more to do with power than sex. (At which point I can hear a whole cluster of dick pic survivors chanting in unison, “Really, you think?”)

  The next day when I heard from Tony, a Spanish man of stout middle age, I told him about the dick pic I’d had the night before, and how unappetizing it was (how unappetizing they always are). It was reassuring that Tony sympathised. He told me that I was hanging out with the wrong class of people and that I should block anyone like that, and focus on the quality men, like him. He was undoubtedly a monumental snob, keen to ensure I knew he was wealthy, a successful business owner. He’d been in touch, on and off, for months, and kept popping up to tell me how much trouble he was having finding “quality women.” He would describe the women he’d met in disparaging terms. They were fat (he didn’t seem to have registered that I was non-slender), or unattractive, or wore too much makeup. They wore “lesbian shoes,” he said, or “had no class.” Like lots of other men online, he wanted a lady. “I can’t believe how difficult it is to find the second Mrs. Tony,” he’d say, expecting me to sympathize. At a low point—around the time that my dog died—I gave him my mobile number, and he’d rung three or four times, usually to tell me that he’d had another bad date. One day he said that we ought to meet. I told him he woul
dn’t like me. “It’s just lunch, for God’s sake,” he chided. “Don’t take everything in life so seriously.”

  Still I dithered, even though he was a heavy smoker, and had no interest in giving up, and the smell of fags on someone’s breath makes me gag. Dammit, I thought, I’m tempted to have lunch with this awful man who says outrageous things about women: this won’t do at all. But he seemed to think I was a catch, which was an unusual enough situation to warrant consideration. He hadn’t referred to my body once, nor mentioned sex, nor suggested Skype nudity. Perhaps the smoking didn’t have to be a total deal-breaker. There are strategies and even hypnotists for ending people’s addictions. Perhaps Tony’s openly judgmental streak was really just a kind of social coping, a way of getting a rise out of people. I was having an internal debate about it.

  And then, the next time we spoke, he told me a racist joke, and when I probed a bit it became clear that he was a white supremacist, the real McCoy. (In general I’d say, in retrospect, and we could call this Lesson Eight: if you have to talk yourself into seeing someone, presenting lists of pros and cons, you’ve reached a desperate phase and should probably avoid them.) At the end of our brief encounter Tony was convinced that I was the one who was a terrible bigot, for saying I found smoking intolerable.

  I went to the coffee shop looking for Andrew, wanting to balance things by talking to someone I felt comfortable with, and sure enough he was there, reading an article about George Osborne. We blundered straight into a huge argument about austerity. It turned out that Andrew thought we needed to slash the welfare budget further. He thought poverty was a necessary social tool and that welfare was bankrupting us. I was genuinely taken aback by this. How had I not known this fundamental thing about him? The argument grew heated, though only on my side; he confined himself to nodding, before presenting me, coolly, with what he insisted were indisputable facts. On the way home I suffered a serious attack of midlife anxiety. How can we get to know people, new people, in middle age, how can we feel that we really know them like the people we’ve known a long time, without issuing and consulting a thousand-question questionnaire?

  I was nervous and on edge. When I got home I rang Bill and told him about my weird horrible day, and how I’d had two surprising arguments with two different men. I told him that Tony was a racist and what Andrew and I had argued about; Bill was horrified by both, and that cheered me up immediately. “Listen,” I told him, “I think you and I should meet halfway. Let’s do it. Let’s meet halfway and have lunch and buy jumpers.”

  “I have news,” Bill said. “I’ve started seeing someone.”

  I said to a friend later that night that I was thinking of throwing in the towel. There was no doubt about it: my milkshake was NOT bringing all the boys to the yard. I didn’t even know any longer if I wanted it to. There was no question that I needed to get on with life and redirect my energies. I was aware that the terms and price of the search were making me narrow, and miserable and odd. Why did I need a man to be happy? The friend said that if her own husband were to leave, she would embrace the single life with relief. “I’ve done my stint. I think I’d pack up my kit and bid a rather grateful farewell to sex and sexual relationships, and compromise.” A world without men. Happy celibacy. Why wasn’t it enough? Partly, for sure, it was the need I felt to be part of a team. I’d had a hard time, and one person to deal with life didn’t seem like enough. I liked the idea of being happy to be alone, but couldn’t make myself want it. I’d see women’s magazine happiness pieces at the hairdresser’s: You Can Get Happy! How to Get Happy in 12 Easy Steps! There she was, the Happy Woman, a radiant skinny woman on a country lane on a bicycle, sticking out her happy legs and laughing uproariously—in a way that, frankly, might have been dangerous to other road users. I was afraid I wasn’t a 12-Step woman. I was afraid that 12-Step plans for happiness might be the psychological equivalent of 12-Step plans to get fit: something to feel stressed about and to fail at.

  The Mad Men–styled thirty-five-year-old got in touch again. Lars. All I could winkle out of him was that he lived in a rural suburb and worked in the banking sector. He asked me what I wanted, before having sex, and I said a drink was traditional: a drink and perhaps a little conversation. He didn’t want to meet for a drink. What was the point of delaying things? People should just meet and have sex, and do the talking afterward, he said. Dating was a waste of time until it’d been proven that the sex was good. “Let’s just skip that and go to bed,” he said. “What do you say? I could come over right now. Just say the word. The word is Yes, by the way, in case you were wondering what the word is.”

  “Very nice of you, but I like to know more about a person before I sleep with them. Their last name for instance.”

  “My last name’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to me. Your reluctance makes me 95 percent sure that you’re married.”

  “I’ve never been married. I have no intention ever of being married.”

  “Why are you on the dating site, Lars? Why are you talking to me?”

  “I want to have sex with you, and like everybody I’m looking for lurvve.”

  I thought it likely that only half of that statement was true. “Let’s sext, at least,” Lars wrote. I ignored this and went off to do something else, and when I returned to my phone he’d already delivered his opening salvo, a deeply unsexy account of our getting together that featured lots of knob and cum and hole.

  Shortly after this another dating site hopeful sent me an unsolicited dick pic. It seemed to have become fashionable, commonplace, a thing, to send photographs of your thing. Perhaps it came about via morphic resonance, afflicting men simultaneously across the world. Perhaps someone was in possession of a cultural megaphone somewhere, and was telling men that it turned women on, that it encouraged them to meet you to see the dick in person. Maybe they thought that a dick pic acted as a letter of introduction. It’s hard to say. Or maybe men just like to get their willies out and take pictures of them, like that sub-culture of women who can’t stop taking snaps of their own cleavages. Pride might be at the heart of the dick pic phenomenon. I have to tell you, though, chaps, that lots of us aren’t anything but startled (and, I’m afraid to say, repelled) by an unexpected erection arriving in our mobile phones, so you might be having the opposite effect to the one intended.

  On this occasion there was the oddest sequence of events. I got an approach message from Lucas, a man who lived eighty-five miles distant, asking if I’d like to have a conversation. He was lonely but not ready for a relationship; technically he was still married, though they’d been separated for a while, he said. So for a couple of weeks we were basically pen-pals. Typically, I’d get an email from him at around 9 a.m., and I’d reply in the evening. It was platonically friendly, amiable chat. Then, quite suddenly, he sent an intimate picture of himself, very late at night. It’s difficult to know how to reply to one of these, if you don’t want to respond with the aid of a camera. If you have no intention of joining in, what do you say? I went for, “Whoah, that was unexpected, was that really meant for me?” He didn’t reply. Instead he sent two more, taken from other angles.

  Then, in the morning, he emailed as usual as if it hadn’t happened. Only now he had quite different things he wanted to say. Now he wanted to talk about his unhappiness—partly, no doubt, to account for the emailed erection. He said he’d been bullied in his marriage, which made it difficult to trust women, which was an odd thing to say, given the photography exhibition of the night before. That hadn’t come across as a lack of trust. He asked if he could call me and talk it over, and during this call he mentioned that he was having trouble convincing his wife that their marriage was over. She seemed to think they were just on a break, he said. What?! Well, in that case, I told him, we can’t take this any further, because you’re not really free.

  Next, I had a dating site message from a man called James, a round-faced, twinkly-eyed mischievous-looking man in his mid-forties, who wanted to
invite me to lunch. I know I live twenty-five miles away, he said, but I have a very fast car. His profile didn’t divulge much—it was a generic listing that could apply to most people: he liked the things everybody likes, and asserted that he was easygoing. For him, a good sense of humor was most important in a date; the craic was far more important than the physical look of someone, he said. He addressed himself to the world in these abstract terms, offering nothing specific or individual to latch on to, apart from one detail: his love of fishing. I’ve never been fishing so we had a chat about it by email, and then he said he’d like to phone. I gave him my mobile number—it’s easy to block callers on your mobile, and so it’s fairly low risk—and James rang, and he was warm and friendly, though somewhat chippy.

  First of all he worried that I sounded posh. “I’m not remotely posh,” I told him, “I’m just English” (he was Scottish).

  “You sound posh to me, but then I’m a poor boy from the projects,” he said. “We don’t call them that but that’s what they are.”

  “I’m not posh at all,” I said. “I just don’t have much of an accent, thanks to living in different places as a child.”

  Then he worried that I read too much, and was too highly educated for a boy who left school at sixteen. He worried that I liked Scrabble and crosswords and made me self-conscious: was I expected to apologize? It felt a little bit like I was. I began to wonder why he wanted to talk to me. “I’m a bit of a pleb,” he said. I was sure that he didn’t think so at all. What he was really saying was that he thought I would think so. I asked him why he wanted to meet if he’d already decided I wasn’t right for him.