Mid-Life Ex-Wife Read online

  EIGHT RULES FOR ONLINE DATING—AND SOME HARD-EARNED ADVICE

  The plan to woo by written word wasn’t completely wrongheaded. A little bit of emailing or a long phone conversation before meeting is helpful. It would be sad to fall for Trevor, for instance, based on his lovely smile, his love of theater and his manners, and only realize in a post-coital chat that he was the man who didn’t want a woman who was his intellectual equal. But Don’t get into a protracted email cycle with people: that’s Rule One of dating, and the one I broke the most.

  Rule Two is: Don’t underestimate other people’s capacity for snap judgments. Sometimes all it takes to bring things to an untimely end is for someone to get their first proper view of your arse encased in jeans. They have inflexible arse-size-shape criteria, and that’s that.

  Watch out for people like Martin, the email-lover who talked the talk and walked away. He could be Cyrano de Bergerac but he wasn’t really free. Rule Three is: Don’t assume everybody is equally single.

  Rule Four is also pertinent here: People are often prepared to lie to get out of a tight spot. Martin told me he didn’t want to meet me because he was afraid he’d break my heart. It wasn’t true. He just felt massively cornered.

  Rule Five is: Don’t assume we all have the same intentions and integrity. I know of women who’ve been wooed by men who then dropped them without comment. They met and slept with men they met online, and never heard from them again. One of the women asked the man who’d done this to her why he’d done it. “He said that actually having sex on the first date meant he wasn’t interested,” she said. “He wanted to get sex out of it at least.”

  Rule Six is: Don’t ever feel pressured into having sex. The person communicating that pressure is not your friend: it’s that simple.

  Rule Seven is: It’s normal online dating practice to ignore someone’s messages if you don’t fancy them. The first nine times this happened I was convinced there was a glitch in the system, and wrote to one of the Admins.

  Rule Eight is: Just because you are in the grip of something it doesn’t mean the other person is. I don’t have to tell you that I broke this rule with Andrew. I was convinced for weeks that Andrew and I had the spark, and misled myself about the reason for his keenness to talk. Andrew, it turns out, talks to everybody and anybody. Andrew lives alone, and when unleashed on the society of a neighborhood coffee shop, with its congregation of regulars, has trouble stopping talking. It didn’t even occur to him that I might be a prospect.

  I still see Andrew sometimes, though I rarely go to that coffee shop anymore. He doesn’t change. He talks about change and seems to be stuck. The last time I talked to him, his eyes kept straying to the denim-clad bottom of a young woman who was organizing her coat, bag and laptop at the next table. He said that he was thinking about relocating to somewhere in Asia, because in Asia a woman would be happy to look after him and also the house, without expecting much in return. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. I asked if he was seeing anyone. “Depends how you define it,” he said. “As you know, I don’t do relationships.” How would I know, and what on earth did he mean? “Jesus Christ,” I said to myself as I walked home. “You really dodged a bullet, there.”

  General advice to women: Watch out for men who are dating in the open sense: seeing a lot of people at once and auditioning, perhaps permanently. Watch out for men who use the word femininity pejoratively, or who use the term red pill. Watch out for men who think women have a duty to keep young and beautiful, at the expense of being, thinking, doing, reading, eating, traveling, experiencing. I don’t advise hooking up with one of these guys, if you intend to live past sixty. I don’t know about you—perhaps you take pleasure in being high maintenance, and if so, carry on, do your thing; whatever floats your boat. I intend to be even lower maintenance than I am now, in my sixties. I intend to do a lot of being, thinking, doing, reading, eating, traveling, experiencing, in my sixties. The world of my sixties is principally going to be about not giving a shit what anyone thinks of what I look like. I am going to grant Edward full equality in this. My prediction is that he’ll become stringy (on a diet of buns) and I’ll become stout (despite giving up sugar), and that we’ll love each other forever.

  Advice to men: Don’t send mass mail-outs, but if you do, at least try to disguise them. Be specific. Don’t write a string of generic phrases. We’re looking for a little glimpse of you, in a blind dating world. Don’t leave most of the fields blank on your dating site listing and then say, “If you want to know more, just ask.” Yes, of course I want to know more than your age and where you live, you pillock: how do you think romance works? Don’t mention sex before meeting someone. Don’t assume women will want to engage in your on-screen porn scenario. Don’t add lots of teenage-girl kisses and hugs to your initial approach (total turn-off). Don’t send dick pics. Don’t be a dick.

  I very nearly gave up the search. I thought it was me and that my experience was unusual. I assumed I was alone in having so many travails, until the column appeared, whereupon my mailbox filled up with women saying, “Me too, oh God, me too,” and “I have had near identical issues.” At times, online dating was just too hard. It rocked my confidence. It caused deep new wells of anxiety to be dug. I went repeatedly into people-pleaser mode (for some of us, it’s hard-wired) and hated myself for it. Honestly, what’s the point if that’s how it makes you feel? The process is supposed to be about happiness, but a dating site is a machine, one that could trample you and break your bones. It’s a system that can facilitate very bad behavior, for those who want to behave badly. Why put yourself through that? You might as well stay at home with your dog and read books and drink tea, and twiddle your toes in contented singledom. At least there’s integrity in that, and self-esteem.

  Well. The answer, for me, comes back to the outcome. I found Edward at the end of my long road, and so I can’t do anything but recommend it.

  If you were thinking of trying online dating, I’d say go ahead, but cautiously and fully armored. You will almost certainly have knockbacks and you might also hear from oddballs with “niche” desires. That’s okay: you’re not under any obligation to explain yourself. There are times when it’s okay to make the V sign to the screen and move on, and blow a raspberry at the same time. Even after a dating disaster, a summary rejection, keep the door open. Keep a foothold in possibility. Keep the door open but don’t expect too much. Have dignity and be your authentic self. Be pithy rather than gushing, and wait and see. Be your real age. Post recent photographs, including one that really looks like you; you want someone who will fall in love with your morning face. You don’t want someone who falls in love with Gilda, only to be disappointed to wake up with Rita Hayworth (though they’d be idiots, obviously). Don’t pedal too much. Don’t plead. Remind yourself that this is supposed to be fun. You’re not a commodity; you’re the client, and others’ judgment is essentially irrelevant. Don’t get over-invested before meeting. Don’t email twenty times. Don’t find yourself in an email/Skype relationship from which you have to extricate yourself. Break the ice, make an arrangement, then meet somebody. If the other person’s consistently too tired or busy to talk or to meet, take the hint: they are virtually wearing a T-shirt with I DO NOT WANT YOU written on it; they’re virtually digging an escape tunnel. If it goes wrong, the mantra is YOUR LOSS, BUDDY. (This is all advice I wish I’d taken.) Looking back at the dating diary now, I’m often amazed at things I did and said, half entertained and half clammy with regret. There may seem a high cost to online dating, but I’m here to tell you something I never expected to be able to say: that if you stand firm and you’re lucky, there’s also a prize.

  As some people were unreticent about saying, when the column came to an end, there’s suspiciously good news at the end of this quest: it’s too happy an ending to believe and Edward’s too good to be true. When I told him some people didn’t believe in him, he said, “Tell them I don’t believe in them either.” He knew about the
column. He knows about this book. His first reaction was “That’s brave.” His second was “Do you mind if I don’t read it?” (No. No, I don’t. I really, really don’t, sweetheart.)

  A Final Dedication

  This book is retrospectively dedicated to you, Edward.

  You’re unlikely ever to read this, but thank you, thank you for the happy ending, for the heartfix, which I didn’t really believe was possible when I embarked on this quest. You’re the kindest, most thoughtful, most loving of men, and your love, friendship, care and adoration are sincerely and enthusiastically returned. I love you. I’m so happy to be sharing my life with you.

  About the Author

  STELLA GREY has been writing her “Mid-life Ex-wife” column in the Guardian since November 2014. (Stella Grey is a pseudonym.)

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  Credits

  Cover design by Joanne O’Neill

  Cover photographs: © Stocksy, © Shutterstock, and © Getty Images

  Copyright

  Originally published as THE HEARTFIX in Great Britain in 2016 by 4th Estate.

  MID-LIFE EX-WIFE. Copyright © Stella Grey 2016. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION PUBLISHED 2017.

  ISBN 978-0-06-265623-0 (pbk.)

  EPub Edition May 2017 ISBN 9780062656247

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