I’d like to thank all the people who have supported me in telling this story: Harriet Green, my editor at Guardian Family, who had already heard about some of these events, and who commissioned the original column. Clare, my sub-editor there. Nicholas Pearson, my editor and publisher at 4th Estate, who approached me with an offer to produce a book. The friends who cheered me on, throughout this journey, with unwavering support and love. My family, the thought of whom makes my hand clasp to my heart. My literary agent, who is always steadfastly in my corner. All the women (and men, too) who shared their dating stories – some of them very similar to my own – online and in letters.
Last of all, but by no means least … you’ll have to get to the end to see that final dedication.
The end of my marriage was an event that came suddenly and unexpectedly. It was rather like that scene in Alien, in which John Hurt is sitting contentedly eating spaghetti with the spacecraft crew, and then the infant monster bursts out of his chest, leaving everybody shocked and splattered. My ex-husband fell in love with someone else, and that’s that. I can say, ‘And that’s that,’ now, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t take time and a lot of ups and downs to get here, to the point at which I’m able to use three words. At the time it didn’t feel real; we’d been married a long time; and then, when I started online dating, hoping to be cheered up, things became even more surreal. Life got quite Alice in Wonderland, as you will see. The journey I took – and I do think of it as a journey – was weird, hilarious, difficult, mind-boggling, nerve-racking and ultimately … (but I’m not going to spoil it for you). I online-dated for almost two years, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that it shaped the person I am now, a different person in various ways to the person I was. In many ways I like her better than the old me.
Dating was a strong medicine taken in the hopes of softening the corners of a desperate sadness. It wasn’t easy, drawing the line that ended the married years and declaring myself to be single. It wasn’t that I bypassed the heavy drinking phase. When somebody announces that they’re leaving you, it’s a physical shock. It starts in your brain and reverberates through your bones. It might feel like being told you have a terminal illness (when in fact it’s usually highly treatable, and in time you’ll get better). First there is denial, and then there is rage, and then there is acceptance. Denial is parasitical and tries to colonise you, and the rage that follows is like a baby cuckoo, perpetually hungry, and then there’s acceptance, when you begin to want to make the best of getting up in the morning and carrying on. Renewal might follow. Renewal is a painful experience. It means being properly alive again, and trusting and vulnerable, and that can hurt.
There came a point, having healed sufficiently, having moved on from the daytime vodka phase – daytime vodka while eating whole tubs of ice cream and crying over property search programmes (it’s distressing to be a cliché, but there you are) – at which I thought, So now what? So now what? is a good sign. It marks the first day of looking forward, and not back. I’m not saying I stopped harking back, but I began to look ahead and think about what might happen next. I’d always imagined the future would be shared with my husband, and now there were many other roads, forking off, over hill and dale and into the unknown. It occurred to me for the first time that I might not be unhappy for the rest of my life. I realised that it was all in my hands. I ditched the vodka, the dairy products stacked in the freezer and daytime television. I had a haircut and colour, bought a dress and went to the bookshop. I sat on a park bench with my books in a bag (not all of them self-help, either), tilting my face up to the early spring sunshine, and decided that I needed to meet new people, and by people I mean men.
The world was full of couples and I wanted to be half of one of them. That was the mission. It was my own diagnosis of what I needed. I was heartbroken and needed a fix. I needed a heartfix. The world was full of couples busy being casually happy with one another. The young ones didn’t trouble me, the kind who canoodled in cinema queues. But the midlife ones really bothered me, and particularly the silver-haired, affluent couples holding hands in the street. There was a prime example in the coffee shop where I used to hang out at the weekend, a pair who were just back from holiday. They were talking about how much they were missing island light and their swimming pool. She was wearing the bracelet he’d bought her, and it was turquoise against her tanned arm. The non-affluent retired bothered me too: the world was full of ordinary untanned, badly dressed, unattractive older couples who had every intention of being together till they died, and I began to find that simple loyalty overpoweringly moving. Heartbreak felt constantly hormonal, like persistent PMS. I was having trouble feeling sensible about the odds of finding somebody who would feel as natural and right at my side as my husband once had. But I needed to do something, even if it turned out just to be a phase on the way to being happy to live on my own.
A friend suggested internet dating. She’d plunged in and she had found someone lovely. Most people in the online pool were dull or odd or nuts, or love rats, she said (I assumed she was exaggerating), but it was a lot more fun than endless nights in with slippers and shiraz and Sudoku, and only a dog to talk to. Online dating! It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t an online dating type of person: that much I was sure of. I’d read the horror stories that circulate, and had heard some too, about cattle markets, players and lotharios, married men and psychos and scams. But it seemed daft not to look, so I hovered around the sites for a week or so. (It was ‘free to join!’– though not to reply to messages, it turned out, when I’d taken this promise at face value.) I spent time dipping in as a lurker and observer, equal parts horrified and tantalised. Being tantalised was surprising. There were male profiles that intrigued me: kind-faced, rumpled, witty men who’d managed to hurdle over the dignity issue involved in self-advertising, and had signed up. Once I’d done the same, I had a powerful sense of being part of something. It was strangely poignant, this feeling, as if I were part of a great river of people who had been bashed by life and were brave. They were bold enough to embark on the search for love in this new-fangled digital way, each risking humiliation, failure and ridicule in their determination to swim upstream. I was aware of the distinct possibility of all three outcomes – humiliation, failure, ridicule – but I was lonely, and I don’t just mean for male company. I was lonely in general; unhappiness is a solitary state and I couldn’t keep talking about it and going round in circles in my head and feeling stuck. I needed to break out of the cycle, and be fresh, to have a fresh life. The bizarre process of choosing potential lovers and life-mates from what is essentially an online catalogue would bring a broadening-out into my narrowing life, at least, and I was badly in need of something radical. Distraction, at the least. Was a second love possible? Was a second love found via a website for singles remotely possible? It seemed unlikely. But what else was I going to do – sit here festering, eating snacks and watching Miss Marple reruns?
So I decided to have a go. What did I have to lose, after all? I signed up to the biggest of the no-fee sites, filled in the questionnaire, posted a photograph that hinted at hidden depth, and took two hours to write and polish my profile, distilling life experience and interests into nuggets that offered fascinating glimpses of my inner world (I thought). Gratifyingly, half an hour later I had two messages. The first said: ‘Hello sexy. You look very squeezable. First, can I ask – do you eat meat? I couldn’t kiss someone who consumes the flesh of tortured animals.’ The second said: ‘Hi. I can see from your face that you have shadows in your heart. I think I can help.’ I hit the reply button and asked how he was going to do that. ‘I will shine a great light upon you,’ he wrote. I logged off and sat for a while, staring at the screen. Then I logged on again, to see if anyone else had written yet. There was a message from someone called Freddie. All it said was ‘Hi’ followed by nine kisses. I had a look at Freddie’s profile. It consisted of two sentences: ‘Honest, caring, tactile man, looking for sensual woman. Please – no game players, gold diggers, liars or cheats.’
I reckoned that what I needed