‘I have paper books, and vinyl records,’ Henry wrote. He was confident that this was a superior culture to all others. ‘Come and see me. Come and visit. I’ll sacrifice a chicken.’
‘We could meet at a restaurant,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable coming to your house.’
‘It’ll be fun to meet someone younger,’ he said. ‘You seem young to me. The last woman I dated was 66.’
‘Can I ask you something? Are women of 66 looking only for companionship?’
‘God no; they’re all gagging for it,’ he wrote. Then another message arrived. ‘Why are you on this dating site? The truth now. No fibbing.’ It was hard to know what he meant. ‘You’re not coming to see me, are you?’ he wrote before I could reply. ‘You wouldn’t like me anyway. I have dirt under my fingernails. I don’t have any money. I watch a lot of sport on TV.’ His Luddite sensibility, I noted, didn’t extend to banning television.
While I was pondering, I received a surprise invitation to dinner. I emailed Henry and said that I thought it best to tell him that on Saturday I was going out to dinner with a man I vaguely knew. He didn’t reply, and when I went back on the site I discovered that he’d blocked me, so that I couldn’t message him again. The man who was going to take me out to dinner realised on Thursday afternoon that he was still in love with his ex-wife, and cancelled.
The turn of summer into autumn brought Finn, a man with thick, layered short hair, reddish brown, and smiley eyes and a beard and an interesting job in the arts.
Finn had a lot of charm, and a diverse life and plenty to say for himself. He had a creative job and a wide social network, and I was chuffed when all this light was shone in my direction. We emailed a little bit and then he wanted to go over to Skype. There are online daters who like Skype, and I can see why: quite apart from the potential for nakedness between strangers, it can be used for pre-screening. It’s almost like meeting. There are people who regard an hour spent on Skype with someone as a date. I’ve heard it described as a clean date: you get to ‘meet’ without having to risk a coffee shop or wine bar failure, without having to climb out of a bistro bathroom window. But I didn’t like Skype. I found Skype nerve-racking. I’d chatted to a man on Skype once before. I passed the first-round interview – which is how I thought of it – and was asked out, but then the date’s face fell when we met in person and he saw the body that was attached to the head. I was made to feel that I’d been guilty of some sort of confidence trick (what had I been expected to do – parade round my sitting room in a swimsuit?). So I wasn’t that keen on Skype. However, Finn was insistent that we should break the ice before meeting. He was more of a visual person than a verbal one, he said; he was dyslexic and typing took him a while. I felt bad, hearing this, about my knee-jerk reaction to men who can’t spell or punctuate properly. It had been a blanket kind of rejection thus far. I’d had a policy that associated those who couldn’t spell with those who didn’t read. (There’s a correlation, for sure, but no, it isn’t reliable.) I’d written, earlier in the dating diary: ‘I’m sorry, but if he can’t punctuate I don’t want to go near his pants.’ And now I felt bad about that.
Anyway, the upshot was that I said yes to Skype and answered nervously when the laptop screen began to ring.
So there he was – the cherubic and yet grave face of Finn the bearded. ‘Hey,’ he said, his eyes amused. ‘How are you?’
I’ve never found that an easy question to answer; I mean, what is it really asking? I told him I was all right. I didn’t have any comedy lines prepared. I was too nervous to be anything but robotic. ‘And how are you?’ I asked. ‘What have you been doing today?’
He didn’t answer the question. Instead he wanted to know what sort of sex I liked. I was vague and embarrassed. What’s wrong? he asked me. I said I was just nervous.
‘There’s no need for that, my little peach,’ he said. ‘Look, let’s ring off now, but let’s do it again tomorrow.’
I agreed, even though I didn’t want to. I had a general sense of having been cornered. Sometimes, though, we conspire against and corner ourselves.
‘Would you show me your tits?’ he asked, half an hour into our second Skype call. Strangely, for someone who detests this kind of behaviour, my reaction was helpless laughter. I got the giggles, and didn’t go into immediate emergency laptop shutdown mode. I’d drunk a whole bottle of wine – cabbed up – so as to feel less ill at ease, but it also dealt with the inhibitions.
I was lying on my side, and did as I was told and unbuttoned my shirt. I’ve always been a people-pleaser, keen to impress, keen to be liked, and sometimes this overrides my own inner voice, and caution, and basic good sense. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Look at your tits in that bra, oh my God you’re incredible.’ I slid the straps off my shoulders and he groaned. He was standing at the webcam wanking by then. ‘Christ, we have to meet, we have to meet soon and do this in person,’ he said.
I wanted to have a good cry. I said I had to go and ended the call.
The next morning when I woke, I had a hangover and was ashamed. But I didn’t cancel the date. I was miserable about the prospect of meeting him but I was overriding this with pep talks to myself, of the people-pleasing kind. I told myself not to be so uptight. Why was I so uptight about something so harmless as Skype sex? Why was I such a square? Why couldn’t I do as other women suggested and just have a good time, sleep around, enjoy being single, sow some wild oats, be adventurous with technology, without over-thinking it all? (Because I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t what I wanted.) In any case those weren’t the questions I should have asked. What I should have been asking was, why did you agree to that when you didn’t want to? Why did you pretend to think it was fun when you found it degrading? Why have you arranged to meet this man for a drink?
The following evening, Finn bombarded me with requests for another Skype call. I found myself having to be defensive. I had to be too busy. Were we in a Skype relationship now? Were there going to be expectations? I was the one who was going to look like a player if I backed out now; using a man for one cybersex episode and then dropping him like a brick; that wasn’t something I felt good about. On the other hand, I just didn’t want to do it again.
When we met in a large, dimly lit, vaguely trendy wine bar, I was already sure it was a mistake. I don’t know why I went. I had it vaguely in mind that it would be one drink and then I could send the liaison-ender, the text that explained that I didn’t want to meet again. How could I cancel a drink with a man I’d had sort-of Skype sex with? That would be horrifically shallow, wouldn’t it? (Wrong question, again.)
I got to the bar first and ordered a bottle of wine and two glasses, and drank a glass down. I felt quite sick with nerves. When Finn arrived, the first thing I noticed about him was that he had short legs, and was altogether not the five foot eleven advertised. He was Tom Cruise-sized, but had a megawatt smile, also à la Tom, and sat down heavily with a sigh saying he’d had a beast of a day and thank God for alcohol. I had a whole story prepared about a funny thing that’d happened to me that morning, and he listened, stroking his beard, laughing along. I noticed that he had really small hands, with short fingers, his nails bitten to the quick.
The hour that followed was pleasant enough, though it was devoted to the kind of biographical chat that you know is going to run out eventually. When we’d both tired of filling in the other person on what we’d done and places we’d been, the chat really did run completely dry, and the atmosphere grew strained. We both filled the gap by looking at our phones to see if there were urgent messages. There weren’t, not on my side anyway. He spent five or six minutes tapping away answering a work email while I gazed around at all the people who were a lot more relaxed than we were. When Finn had put his phone away he said, ‘Right – shall we go?’ We went out into the street,