I decided to have another go at resurrecting the situation. I texted Peter the next afternoon and told him I’d eaten too much lunch, a plate of spinach pasta dressed with oil and parmesan shavings, and had fallen asleep on the couch afterwards.
‘You should have anticipated that I was going to do that,’ I wrote jauntily, ‘and stepped in and stopped me.’
‘You need to take responsibility for your own life,’ came the reply. (What the hell? I was just attempting banter with you, Peter. You were supposed to reply in kind. It was silliness. Are men so unused to bantering with women that they think everything they utter is only ever literal?)
Stressed by a peculiar sense of injustice, I went to stay with my mother. Bored on the long train journey, I decided to initiate a text Q and A. Two weeks ago Peter had been mad for a bit of whimsical Q and A. I began with, ‘So when did you last eat cheese?’ I admit I felt a little unwell, a little neurologically unusual. I was exhibiting signs of being just the kind of woman men on dating sites are talking about, when they say, ‘No stalkers or bunny boilers.’ Peter didn’t reply, so I texted again, saying I was on a train and bored, and off to see my mum.
His response was, ‘Have a great trip.’
I texted straight back. ‘Are you okay, is everything okay?’
The phone buzzed a minute later. ‘Lot of work to do, and things on my mind. Talk to you when you get back.’
I couldn’t leave it that long, the not knowing. We had to have a straightforward conversation. But I couldn’t ask the question I wanted to – namely, ‘Is it over, our thing?’ Instead I texted again. ‘Do you like trains and long train journeys?’ He didn’t answer. Forty minutes later, a long, long email about his work travails and tiredness and low mood arrived instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at the end. So that seemed to be that. I felt a kind of relief. It was over, whatever it was. It wasn’t going to drag and dribble on, at least, and there’s a lot to be said for that. But – and I couldn’t help obsessing over this – what was the reason it had failed? We’d had a connection and something had happened to it. It had died. Was it my fault? I wasn’t going to take responsibility for the madness, the twenty million emails, each growing more intimate and rhapsodic, that had preceded the date, because that was absolutely mutual behaviour. But I had the unsettling feeling that somehow or other I was blamed, for bewitching him and then letting him down. For not being pretty, perhaps, or slender, or charming enough, or young for my age, or fascinating. Since meeting me in person, his sense of let-down had been almost palpable.
My poor mother suffered three days of dealing with a lunatic oriented completely towards her phone. I said I seemed to have developed an addictive personality and alarmed her. ‘Not drugs, surely not drugs,’ she said. ‘Please tell me it isn’t drugs.’
‘It isn’t drugs,’ I soothed. ‘I have no interest in drugs, honestly, other than cabernet sauvignon.’
Cabernet sauvignon, or at least the second bottle, was a really bad idea, the kind that seems inspired and brilliant at the time, and makes everything wonderfully clear. Late that night, cabbed up, I wrote a heartfelt email, full of reckless honesty, and went to sleep happy, and woke up shrieking. My mother rushed in, because I was shouting, ‘No, no, no, dear God, please no!’ And yes, the email I had sent him was as bad as I feared, not only needy but borderline unhinged. In general I’d become borderline unhinged. So I sent a second email, which said: ‘Please digitally tear up last night’s drunken ramblings. Like you, I seem to be at a low ebb. It will pass. It’d be nice to see you again, if you’re ever back here. Meanwhile, I wish you all good things.’
A reply came shortly afterwards, saying he’d been tired and overwhelmed with work, and that’s why he’d been so humourless, and that he was sorry. Immediately following this, the phone rang and we talked for a while, about anything and everything, but not about recent weirdness. Afterwards he sent me a text message that said: ‘When we said goodbye just now, I felt like I’d been ripped from your side.’ This, of course, made everything all right. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said to myself. ‘You see, you see!’ It was worth persevering; sometimes good things start badly and this was going to be a prime example. I spent twenty-four hours thinking this, but then received an email from Peter saying that a) I was wonderful and also b) that he didn’t want to see me again.
Once it was properly finished, I looked back on our communication cycle with disbelief. I read it over again and didn’t recognise myself. It looked like an altered state. It was a hard transition, when the love-bombing came to an end, through Adoration Cold Turkey, desperate as a junkie and utterly miserable. But, in the case of imaginary relationships that have their origins online, maybe it was a typical pattern. My guess is that Peter saw immediately we met that the whole thing had been illusory, and if he decided that unfairly early, there isn’t any arguing with it. Intuition and chemistry – they both count for much more than internet dating would have you believe. Setting out to find a compatible person who thinks, talks and lives like you do is all very well, but box-ticking counts for little in the end.
Next, a nice-looking man called Henry wrote to ask if I was ever in Cumbria, because he’d love to invite me to lunch. Henry was 60, and I had to ask myself how I felt about 60, and specifically about being naked with 60. (You may already be saying that this is ageist. I’m just telling you honestly what I thought.) In any case, it wasn’t a qualm that lasted long. Most of us are going to get there, after all, to 60, and we’ll hope to be loved then, whether we have a wrinkly bum or not. I reminded myself that Harrison Ford was now in his seventies; would I say no to Harrison? Reader, I would not. An ex-policeman, Henry was tall and upright, broad-shouldered, and had a knowing look around the eyes, as if he’d been dented by life and had survived and wasn’t going to be a pushover. He was also near-bald, but a middle-aged woman who has issues with hair-loss had better go and buy a stack of jigsaws in readiness for the long nights alone.
He sent a head and shoulders shot that he’d just taken in his kitchen, showing a smiling attractive man in a frayed blue shirt. He was standing in a tiny cottage in the wilds, where he was attempting to live self-sufficiently. His dating site profile was skimpy; when I asked him why it didn’t give much away, he told me that words are meaningless and meetings are everything. After the Peter fiasco it was a view I’d come to have some sympathy for. On the other hand, a woman needs some clues and pointers if she’s going to travel right across England for lunch. He’d volunteered his surname and village, but I couldn’t find him anywhere via Google. I realise this is new-fashioned, but not being able to find someone on the web, not a trace, is a cause of anxiety to me. I’m simultaneously repelled and reassured by people who are bedded in to social media, who can be observed being droll on Twitter, who have many friends on Facebook and are demonstrably non-psychotic there. Henry seemed like a loner. He confessed that he didn’t like the internet; in fact, he loathed the internet and all its workings, he said. He thought it was responsible for a decline in our human culture. It’s an interesting debate but Henry didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. Some things are black and white, he said, and the internet has been bad news