‘So let’s get the nitty gritty over with,’ I wrote. ‘One paragraph on how your marriages came to an end, and then I’ll reciprocate. We’ll indulge ourselves just once in self-pity and then never speak of it again. You first. What did you do, to go and get yourself dumped?’
It turned out that he was the dumper, both times. The reasons were plausible enough: they’d been too young, the first time, and they’d grown apart the second time, and relations with the exes were said to be good. That’s how Peter passed the Dump Test.* (*If a man in consideration was a dumper and not a dumpee, my ears pricked up. If a man was a serial dumper, if he kept getting bored, like a restless kid with too many toys, or if he’d found a string of women sexually dull, there was often a loud buzzing in my ears. If he’d left a woman because she had let herself go, the conversation was probably over.)
This was the beginning of a bout of constant messaging, in which we swapped our sad stories, though we told them to each other in a Woody Allen-style voiceover, competing to see who could be funnier. ‘How are relations with the ex now – amicable enough?’ he wanted to know. Men kept asking me this. Men are somewhat obsessive on the question. Women don’t envisage punch-ups in suburban driveways with jealous ex-wives, but it seems that men do have visions of the reverse case. And of course none of us wants to be with someone with a lot of baggage, that horrible term for stuff about the past that still niggles me. The truth is that we all have stuff in the past that still niggles us. We all need to be with someone who can put their baggage aside, into storage. It can’t be eradicated but it can be left to gather dust.
Peter and I seemed to have equivalent baggage levels, ones that were minimal and undramatic. We both had a residual sadness, one we were confident could be assuaged by another love, by hope. Old sadness had become a new thirst. We agreed that in midlife there is always sadness, and it’s not all about lost relationships. At this point we’re likely to have suffered all sorts of losses – of family and friends, of hopes and dreams, ambitions and plans, of wild ideas and time. A lot of time had gone, never to be recovered. We agreed on all this and then we agreed not to talk about past relationships again, not until we knew each other a lot better. Each of us wanted to draw a line and reinvent life: that’s how we talked to each other, on the fourth day of emailing.
On day four Peter asked if he could have my mobile number. He had something important to ask me, he said. I handed over the number in some trepidation (please, not more deadly, unerotic stockings and heels talk) but there was no need to fear. The question was this: ‘Cryptic crosswords, yes or no?’ I answered – yes! – and asked him in a second text: ‘IKEA, yes or no?’ to which the answer, quite rightly, was, ‘Addicted to the meatballs.’ After this we were off, texting random questions to one another. By day five, dozens of whimsical queries had been sent. Whimsy was the key element. It provided safe and solid foundations. We were developing banter and were going to be friends, even if we weren’t going to be lovers.
Simultaneously via email we began to exchange Top Tens – our top ten films, songs, books, meals, cities, heroes, places, dates to return to in a time machine … you name it, we were Top-Tenning it. I barely had time to work, so intent was I on watching my phone and waiting for its little light to flash.
At the same time a small patch of unacknowledged anxiety had developed a pulse. It wasn’t just my physical self that was being misrepresented in this lead-up, by the sending of out-of-date photographs. In my communications with Peter I wasn’t really me, either, because I’d reframed myself so as to be more attractive to a man who seemed tremendously self-aware and self-possessed, and needed me to be the same. I camouflaged myself so as to attract him. I became, in the letters, the kind of person who could handle most things: charming, cheerful, non-melancholy and staunchly un-neurotic, whose response to the ups and downs was (almost relentlessly) philosophical. I wish I really was her, I thought – that woman Peter’s writing to. Of course it was perfectly possible that he was doing the same ventriloquism, covering up weakness and fear with comedy and wit, so as to impress women with his tremendous psychological health. It could have been a mutual confidence trick; there was no way of knowing. We had no inkling of each other’s complexities. As yet, we hadn’t even spoken on the phone.
One afternoon, his messages began to venture beyond friendship. He texted that he was drinking coffee and about to go into a dull meeting, but was feeling happy because he had me in his life. The die was now cast. Once you go into this territory, and begin to talk ahead of your current reality, there’s no going back. It’s genuinely very hard to resist: it may not seem like it, sitting where you’re sitting (I wouldn’t have believed it either) but it is. Romance, real romance, being courted and wooed, is a thing difficult to say no to. It’s especially difficult when you’re sad. You’re sad, and not very hopeful, and suddenly there’s this wonderful man, clever and witty and kind, telling you that his day has been made better and brighter because he has you in his life. You might find yourself swept up in it, and responding in kind. It’s easy. ‘I’m so glad I have you in my life, too; I have a spring in my step that wasn’t there a week ago, and that’s down to you, Peter.’ When you respond in kind, it’s game on. The trouble is that in many cases game on leads swiftly to game over.
‘I can’t wait to meet you; I can hardly wait,’ he wrote. ‘I’m enjoying this, but I want more. I want a lot more.’ It was clear that it was time to come clean, so I sent him an email confessing to looking my age. His reply was titled SNAP; he said he’d put on a good stone and was considerably greyer than in the site photograph. He didn’t care a jot, not an infinitesimal part of a jot, about my weight, he said. I wrote all this in my dating diary. And I wrote this: ‘I may be in love with him already.’
Because we’d already stepped over the line – not only into the possibility of love but the expectation of it – in the days before meeting we continued to rush things in a way that isn’t wise. We sped ahead far too fast; we were both accelerators, and it got seriously out of hand. Not sexually: we didn’t talk about sex but we were both madly romantic and sure. Some days I got twenty messages, many of them beginning, ‘Hey beautiful’. This bothered me because I’m not beautiful. If he’d decided I was a beauty, I knew that we could both be in a lot of trouble. The communications ratcheted up. I’d get a text saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day,’ and could reply that I’d been the same, because it was true: thinking about him, and composing emails and questions, and answers to questions. And yet, so far we hadn’t even spoken.
Two days before the date he texted that he wanted to hear my voice. I’d avoided the phone, feeling that it was an extra audition that I might fail, and was nervous all day, watching the clock, but needn’t have been. We talked for over two hours, and afterwards he texted that he seemed to be falling in love, though how was that possible? It couldn’t be real, this attachment, he said, but it felt real, and this was all new territory and he didn’t quite know how to navigate it. I confessed that I felt just the same. When he didn’t reply to a text one afternoon, and then didn’t react to a follow-up one asking if all was well, I messaged saying, ‘It’s been four hours since I heard from you and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Is that weird?’ Of course it was weird; it was downright dysfunctional. I’d sit at the computer, trying to work, and really I’d be waiting. I’d smile at the mobile when another of the questions arrived that we continued to ask one another. ‘Do you like Victorian novels?’ ‘Do you ever make bread?’ ‘Do you have any phobias?’
In two short weeks, my life had become Peter-oriented. All the usual procedural stuff – house chores, phone calls, admin, arrangements, seeing friends, the ordinary obligations, and yes, doing the work I was contracted to do – began to feel difficult, even unimportant. I put things off. Others were put on hold. A period of romantic mania gripped me. I was in an altered state, one that was all-consuming. I was constantly, tiresomely upbeat and full of energy. I was of Doris