Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 8

  But it was actually the opposite. It was a massive misfire, as serious a misfire as that which had occurred at a certain newspaper-owned site, which ought to remain nameless, where men of a generally lefty persuasion—and yes, a lot of them were academics—had been ignoring my emails in droves. (They talked the talk, these egalitarian and enlightened souls, but when it came to walking the walk they walked in a different direction.) The first thing that happened at the graduates-only site was that I had a conversation with a member about what he referred to as “the packaging,” by which he meant my midlife, post-wife, fleshy, bread-loving, wine-drinking self and its deficiencies.

  Writing this up, I’m immediately bombarded, in my head, by a whole stream of openly bolshy questions for men who talk in terms of women this way. Deficient in what sense? As a product, as something of use to you? Is that what my existence means—I’m only of value as something of use to men? I only have worth when viewed by the male gaze? I can see that if that’s your mind-set, then things are very clear. You go out onto the internet looking for the best produce, as if you were squeezing soft fruit at a greengrocer. If the blackening bananas and bruised plums speak up, you’re not going to be much bothered to answer. You’re there to assess and purchase fruit; why would you give your attention to the protests of the over-ripe? Simple.

  Generally my response to a poor start at a dating site was to roll up my sleeves and take the project on with total dedication, and crack the nut, and that’s what I did here. I launched the campaign by sending twenty short approach messages, a dozen to locals and eight to non-locals who were too interesting to ignore, pointing out things we had in common, and being funny about things that we didn’t. I was likable, goddammit, but four days later there had been only three responses, all of them gracious in thanking me for my approval, and wishing me luck. In dating site code, wishing someone luck is akin to pointing a large crucifix and a string of garlic at them. I asked one of these repliers, a man who lived a few streets away, why he didn’t want to meet. He said: “Not wishing to be ungallant, but there are a lot of young and pretty girls here.” So that was me told off.

  When a proper response came, it was full of questions for me to answer. Was I serious about educating myself for the rest of my life? Did I really not watch much television? The man in question appeared to live in a sort of hut at the edge of a wood, 150 miles away and off grid. I answered as honestly as I could, and received my notification of failure later that day. He’d written the kind of brush-off I had become used to, the kind that started by saying how much he liked me. It was an Emotional Rejection Slip. He said that I was an impressive person. (Uh-oh.) The distance, in miles, he had decided, was insuperable. Also, he added by way of a postscript, he didn’t think I was serious enough about science and the world around us and the stars.

  Well, that’s a bit unfair, I thought. But “unfair” is a pointless word in the dating game. There isn’t any point trying to apply the idea of fairness to individual attraction, one person to another. Nothing could be more personal, after all, than liking. If you do try to apply the idea of fairness, you find yourself in emotional fascism, almost immediately. Don’t want what you want because it isn’t fair to the not-wanted; don’t like and dislike; don’t have preferences because that’s unjust: it doesn’t really wash in any context other than employment law. When it comes to sex, we all have our own pillowmeter, the highly unreliable internal gadget that registers our intuition of how thrilled we’d be to see a person’s face on the pillow next to our own. Logically, we have to extend the argument (about fairness not being relevant to attraction) to men and their preferences. Having said that, I’ve come across numerous men using this attraction clause to account for their determination to snag a girl of twenty-five, and others who use it to exclude all women over thirty-five, in one fell swoop. “I’m just not sexually attracted to women over that age”—apparently on principle—is a pretty suspicious line of argument when expressed as an inflexible rule (and not one, I’d hazard, that would survive bumping into Liz Hurley).

  It had been a week of gloomy thoughts about the applicant who referred to “the packaging.” In fact he wasn’t an applicant. He wrote specifically to tell me he wasn’t. “It’s a shame I don’t fancy you,” he wrote, “because otherwise you tick all the boxes.” How do you know that you don’t fancy someone when you haven’t met them in person? You don’t. Charm, intelligence, warmth, quirkiness, wit—all of these can make plain people immensely attractive to us. It’s why I never discounted a plain man out of hand, because in person the monster-faced might prove to have an inner George Clooney. This bloke who thought I ticked all the boxes, he must have thought I was seriously ugly, mustn’t he, to be so rude as that; not even to want to meet a woman who ticked all the boxes? So I was gloomy. It was the Neville situation all over again. (“You may as well give up now, and withdraw from here and save your money.”)

  It wasn’t a one-off, either. Another message arrived, in much the same vein, pointing out that I was plain. “You sound nice,” he wrote, “though unfortunately I have stringent physical criteria.” The fact is, some men are infantile about standards of beauty. (Yes, some women are too. I don’t date women but I’m sure, yes, that women can be horrendously superficial.) Some men—not all of them fantastically good-looking, either—reminded me of fourteen-year-olds who have anxieties about what their mates will think of them if they date a . . . what’s the word? There are various. Think of something unpleasant. Dog—I’ve been called a dog. There are men out there who are basically spotty fourteen-year-olds with pictures of Jennifer Lawrence by their beds, ones that they snog each night before going online to tell women how ugly they are.

  There seems to be a gender imbalance, vis-à-vis the packaging thing. All the women I know are tolerant of middle age showing itself in a chap. We quite like a late flowering, in fact: the silvering, the smile lines, the coming of bodily sturdiness. We read these as signs that life has been lived and enjoyed. We read them as indicators of substance, of being substantial. I like the idea that in our fifties we’re becoming elders of the tribe, with the stories and scars, but also with the understanding, the experience, the wisdom. These are all reasons why I was drawn to men in their fifties, but in general they weren’t granting me the same courtesy. There were exceptions, of course there were—Peter had thought he was interested, for a start—but I didn’t find much of the same narrative playing out in the heads of men I encountered online, about women as valued elders of the tribe, people it would be fruitful, interesting, exhilarating to partner. They were highly focused on the packaging. It was disheartening. It was really genuinely disheartening.

  It didn’t help to discover that a man of fifty-one who’s online dating, a man who’s nice enough but doesn’t look a day younger than his age, might return from holiday to find eighty-four inquiry messages, half of them from much younger women, waiting in his inbox. He might need to apply filters to deal with this glut, and age is an obvious starting place for that. He might have an invitation to meet from a thirty-year-old who has as much to offer as women his own age (he’d argue), in terms of personality and interests. He might think—and plenty of men do think this way—that a woman twenty years his junior will keep him young for longer: he could join in with her own timeline, avoid mirrors and have the illusion of living twice over. It’s not a methodology for life that appeals to me but I can see how it might take hold of someone. At any rate, some kind of filter was needed by Gerald, the man in question, because who has time to see eighty-four people when you don’t need to? Why go to the bother? Age is an easy, immediate, no-fuss filter.

  I think this is how a lot of one-line “thanks but no thanks” replies get written, and how a lot of painstakingly crafted approach messages get ignored. Perhaps the heart is hardened, under the force of such abundance. I tried to imagine what it would have felt like if I’d had eighty-four proper, chatty messages in a single week, and whether it would have made my worldview
different. It’s hard to say. What’s it like to be courted en masse by an enthusiastic fan base? I wonder. What’s it like when far more people than you’d imagined want to talk to you, and say they’re interested in you, and it turns out that they’re young and vital? It’s hard to grasp what that might do to your sense of what’s normal, if the idea of young flesh appealed.

  Gerald’s sense of what was normal had changed. He hadn’t expected to attract much attention on the site, as he was “clapped out,” he said (when I approached him, one of the eighty-four applicants, though he only replied after I’d sent a second message, asking if he was swamped). He was happy to chat about his newfound popularity. He was quite giddy about it. We got onto the question of age, and women, and he said he thought youthfulness was within everybody’s reach. Not youth, obviously, but youthfulness. I told him that I objected to the language that’s used about women in skincare adverts, which promise to rejuvenate us, as if it’s actually about more than how soft and unlined your skin is, but about your womanhood and identity and purpose. (I don’t need that, thank you; I’m just in my fifties; I’m not actually diseased.) He said he thought it was my duty to beautify myself.

  “The word duty makes my blood begin to stir,” I told him. “It’s not boiling but it might reach a slow simmer.”

  “That’s how a lot of men online view women of your age,” he said. “As dilapidated and angry; that’s why they steer clear.”

  “It’s your age too,” I reminded him. “It’s your age too, Gerald.”

  “It’s different for men,” he said. (There you have it. The nub of the matter, encapsulated. In four words.)

  “Well, I have objections to being expected to look younger than I am,” I said. “I like my face as it is, and the years that are written on it; they’re my years and I’m proud of them. I’ve been through things and I’ve survived them and I don’t mind looking like a survivor. I don’t mind being non-skinny, either. My body serves me pretty well, and to want to swap its features for other features, like bigger lips and bigger tits and weird squirrel-with-nuts cheek-plumping seems to me to be an acceptance of a kind of slavery. To me it says, Yes, I am a commodity.”

  “But women do it by choice,” he argued.

  “I don’t always like what other women agree to do,” I said. “Or what they appear to concede that they ought to be, and nor do I think the mechanism’s really that simple.”

  “But you’re wearing lipstick in all the pictures,” he reminded me.

  “Oh yes, I love lipstick,” I admitted, “but I’m not wearing it for you, I promise you.”

  “Women are so irrational,” he crowed.

  “Listen, pal,” I said. “It isn’t irrational, it’s just complicated; there’s a difference.”

  “You’ll never find anyone with that attitude,” he told me.

  I was unmoved by this. A man who thought that my looking my age was a deal-breaker wasn’t a man I had the remotest interest in, you see.

  I told the dating site veteran that I was having a poor response rate to the attempt to market my heart and soul. She was shocked that I was admitting to being fifty. I should change it and say I was forty; lots of men had a search cut-off point of forty and weren’t even seeing me on their lists. I considered this. Did I want to meet those kinds of men, the ones who judge people by their numbers? Would waist measurement be the next thing? Another friend said that the first friend was right. When she was truthful and fifty-four, she’d heard only from seventy-year-olds. The fifty-four-year-old men were all talking to the thirty-five-year-olds, though they’d consider women of forty, at a push. “List yourself at forty and confess to fifty later,” she said. “I did it. Nobody minded. They were doing it themselves, to beat the system.” I had qualms. “Don’t have qualms; it’s routine. Women knock ten years off their age, and men add three inches.”

  During the week that I was forty, my mailbox filled up. The trouble was, they were all messages from men who thought I was forty. When I confessed, nobody wanted to meet. One man said that he’d already guessed; in fact wasn’t fifty a bit of a stretch? He thought I was probably older than that. Another strung me along a while. What kind of fifty was I? I was a spirited, cool, unusual fifty, I said (somewhat desperately). I still wore plimsolls and had a silly sense of humor, I said, citing Monty Python as a for instance; I still bopped to eighties classics in the kitchen. “Good for you, but I’m not interested, not remotely,” he wrote. “I’m not ever going to embark on a relationship which began with a lie.”

  A man of forty-four I got chatting to wanted to know if turning fifty had made an impact on me. “Fifty is wonderful,” I told him. “Fifty feels like the beginning of real freedom.” The truth was that it had been shattering. Fifty was inescapably middle aged, and death was real, and the two came together, tied with a bow. In fact I was well past the middle, in all likelihood. Contemplating this prompted me to start ticking off parcels of future time, to think about finite Christmases and finite summers. We talk about midlife as if it’s really the middle, but at fifty we might be at two-thirds-life, or at an even more dispiriting fraction. Some of us will be culled well before seventy, by illnesses, by vulgar little tumors or the like. Sadly, age isn’t just a number. I’m aware, now, that my body will soon be on the turn, like a lettuce left in the crisping drawer too long. I needed a man who understood this, for whom it was normal and part of the complexity of things, because it was just the same for him. (I couldn’t get my head around why someone would want a partner twenty years younger on principle; surely that just exacerbates aging, which you have to do alone, without them.)

  The fifties could be the best decade of all, if only we could get all our ducks in a row. The world might open up like a flower. Midlife divorce is often to blame for the life-in-decline mind-set, the beginning of a winding-down mind-set, because it can feel like all the good stuff is over. It can feel as if all that’s left are crumbs and dregs, patching leftovers together and keeping buggering on. That is not the way to think of it.

  “I bet you were gorgeous when you were young,” I was told once, via message, as if that were supposed to be a compliment. Yes, I was gorgeous(ish) for a while, in that unthinking unselfconscious way of youth. All youth is beautiful in its way, just because of freshness and newness and potential and firmness and health, but you don’t realize this when you’re twenty and have a bigger bottom than your friends; it’s all mostly a disaster. So yes, I was lovely, and self-absorbed and shallow, and inexperienced and over-sensitive and dull. You’re right, mate, I thought; you’d have much preferred me then. We would have had a lot more in common, for a start.

  As the not-at-all-charming Neville had said, some months earlier, it was over for me. Over. For me. As if the (I hope) thirty years of life that lay ahead of me didn’t mean much, not even to myself. What does it mean to us, as women, to be told that we’re worth less than we used to be? No man I know has ever been told that his powers, his allure, his charm have faded, and that he has to face up to that, as if it means something important. Many women I know in their fifties talk about their invisibility in public places. I’m sure a case could be made for invisibility as a liberating force in a woman’s life, but I was not the woman to make it, six months into the dating game, in the week in which I’d been dissed or else flatly ignored by all the men I said hello to. The failure was beginning to make me rebellious. The experience made me want to look fifty, and talk about fifty, and stand firm with a whole movement of women, rejecting the pressure to try to look thirty-five for ever, throwing our foundation garments and hair dye away. It didn’t last, as a manifesto. I had those impulses and then I went out and had my hair colored, and stopped off on the way home to buy another stupid, snake-oil anti-aging cream.

  It was true that men didn’t see me anymore. They didn’t see me. It was a sobering experience, to walk down the street observing how the fifty-year-old men behaved, paying attention to what they were looking at as they strolled along. They wer
en’t looking in shop windows. They weren’t looking at me. They were looking at women half their age. If I was heading right at them like a car in the wrong lane I might, at best, get one of those rapid, assessing, cataloguing glances, the silent whoosh of the visual body-scanner. Otherwise, I would have had to stage a twisted ankle, an asthma attack or a major wardrobe malfunction in order to be noticed, and even then I’m not sure.

  At the coffee shop, sometimes, I saw men trawling dating sites. One man in particular made an impression: he was someone I would have said yes to, if he’d asked me to meet and drink latte with him. He was mid-forties at a guess, balding but distinguished-looking, sad-looking around the eyes, tall, strong, wearing jeans and a big Aran polo-neck jumper. I had to squeeze past his table to go to the loo, and when I returned, because his laptop was turned toward me as I approached, I saw that he was scrolling through listings on one of the sites I used. I saw a row of female faces, some smiling, some pouting, some looking off dreamily into the distance, in soft-focus filters. All were much younger than him. They all looked about thirty years old.

  I took possession of my coffee house chair and pretended to return to work, but covertly I was watching him, as he looked at female profiles and sent his messages to the chosen. He looked like a man who had suffered disappointments. His mouth was turned decisively down. His ring finger on the left hand bore the paler, indented trace of a wedding band that was no longer there, but had been in place recently enough to leave its unmistakable furrow.

  What would it be like to become the girlfriend of this man, or of a man like this? I wondered. Would he be able to cast off the sadness of the past, and move on with optimism with someone new? Would I, myself, prove able to do that? I thought about what it might be like to marry someone who’d been dumped by the woman he would always love. I imagined the spectre of the woman he would always love following us along the street, standing with us in airport check-in queues, her hand resting lightly on his thigh in bed at night. I could see him lying awake as I dozed on, his eyes open in the dark, lying on his back sleeplessly and saying to himself, “You need to pull yourself together, and soon.” On the other hand, how would I feel about being with a man who professed not to have any feelings for his ex at all, and who had cut her out of his life without any kind of a wound, no remnants, no scar tissue, no grief? We have to find a middle ground. It’s one more thing that life throws at us.