‘None. Women don’t do that. Well, I thought there was one, but she turned out to be a transvestite. Women can’t see other women unless they do a same-sex search.’
‘Exactly. People would think you were secretly a lesbian. If they were secret lesbians too it could become a bit awkward all round.’
Jack had saved some of the profile pages written by skinny middle-aged Pilates-babes in my neighbourhood. The ones he judged successful had a winning combination of softness and steel. They showed a modest sense of achievement and ambition, but not too much. They referenced cultural phenomena that men can relate to (The Fast Show, Blackadder, Shawshank Redemption), and hinted that they had a ditsy side (‘I’m a modern girl, but I admit not great with fuseboxes!!’). They reassured men that they liked sex by using the dating site code-word cuddle (‘cuddles are my favourite thing, and I will look after you’), and they listed outdoor stuff – a passion for hills, skiing, scuba – under Hobbies and Interests. Being outdoorsy is important to lots of middle-aged men. ‘I don’t like to sit still too long,’ the men on dating sites said, over and over. ‘Life is for living and I’m looking for a woman to share the adventure with. No couch potatoes please.’ Perhaps it’s to do with being middle-aged, this insatiable quest for fitness: a sign that a man is resisting time as much as he can, and that he expects a future partner to have the same King Canute-like determination. It helped explain why some of the dismissal of a well-upholstered woman was so sharp and sneery.
A message arrived from Morocco.
‘I see you here tonight and I think you are very beautiful and clever,’ the message began. The sender was sturdy, bald and had a lovely smile. ‘I have a bold idea I would like to put you. I think we are ideal for match and I propose that I send you a ticket to coming to Tangier for a weekend to stay in my house and to have food with me.’ Another message arrived before I could reply. ‘I hope you do not think I am not genuine. I am very genuine.’ He sent references, scans of his diplomas, photographs of him with his children – they did all look very happy – and of his houses (a city one, and a country one with a pool). Half an hour later another message came, telling me more about his life, how I shouldn’t be put off by his being Muslim, how modern he was in his outlook and how international. He said he was aware that his English wasn’t the best, but that I should consider his many educational attainments. He was actually a great catch.
I sent a copy of his second email to Jack. ‘What’s the delay?’ was Jack’s only comment.
‘Casual dates not possible when they involve journeys to Tangier,’ I told him, stating the obvious.
‘It’s not because he’s five foot six and a bit plain, then.’
‘Height I admit is a factor.’
Height was a factor, but I wasn’t fixated on handsomeness. I like the idea of plainness, in fact; plainness is comforting when it’s a plain face that you love. And sometimes, people can become handsome in front of your eyes. Fall in love with someone’s mind and find it beautiful and their face might follow. It happens. I had a photograph of a snaggle-toothed ex-boyfriend on the laptop to remind me of this. What you don’t see in the picture is the power of his eyes, his magnetism, nor how interesting he was in conversation: how he could start to talk and hold a whole room spellbound. In person he was irresistible, but none of that was apparent in the photograph.
Another message arrived from Morocco. I could stay with his sister, my suitor said. She wanted to send me a note assuring me of her brother’s decency. I had to come to a decision and it came down to this: despite all enticements, was I really going to travel to Tangier for this date? No. I replied saying so, with regret, and my correspondent didn’t write again. This annoyed Jack. ‘You could at least have got a free holiday out of it,’ he said. ‘You reject people way too soon. You might have fallen for him. It would all have been a great adventure. You said you wanted an adventure. You could have had a nice life in Tangier.’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘You wouldn’t have done it.’
‘Yes, I would,’ Jack said. ‘Like a bloody shot. But nobody ever asks.’
Simultaneously there was the question of Phil. I’d been trying out my policy of wooing by written word on someone I sort of knew. I hadn’t ever met him, but we were friends of friends, and so the meeting on the internet dating site might have been a bit embarrassing. He didn’t think it was, not at all, he said – or, rather, he wrote, because I never spoke to him or met him. Phil and I illustrated, at an early stage of the quest, the enormous danger of too much emailing. We started out in a pally way, comparing notes on our dating experience. By the second weekend, the messages from him had begun to emit a faint erotic charge. He thought we should meet, he said, but he was so busy. I was enjoying the frisson of email adoration too much to ask why we didn’t fix a date. He resisted making a date. He was up to his eyes in work (he was a lecturer). Instead, he kept writing, and I kept replying. When you live two miles from one another and could put down the laptop and put on your shoes and go and meet for lunch, but instead you confine yourselves to emailing, that’s actually a bit weird. The truth was that we treated each other as substitute people for those we had lost and couldn’t yet find; we had a synthetic kind of intimacy that made us both temporarily less sad. We didn’t admit to that, however. Phil just continued to be busy. And then he said he was muting himself on the dating site, for now, because he really was just too madly busy to have time for it, which was a clean way of ditching me, and I understood, and that was that. This was another lesson learned from internet dating: Lesson Two is that email relationships aren’t relationships. I wish I’d learned that one sooner. Or at all.
I decided not to send any more messages to academics. I suspected that many of them – despite talking the talk about equality, and how a certain age in women is tremendously sexy – nurtured a secret desire for a winsome 35-year-old and a second batch of children. There had also been, pre-Phil, a doomed dating site encounter with a man who lived so much in his head that he was barely sexual at all. He had that bloodless elongated look of a plant grown in the dark, someone who spent all their time indoors. He was looking for someone to talk to about Wagner, and was straightforward about being low-sexed. The highly educated male on the dating circuit is often a creature in need of elaborate mating rituals. Sometimes they are too diffident to suggest that an actual meeting takes place. Sometimes they give the impression of being too sensitive to have an erection. Perhaps, for some, continuous verbal sparring with someone of like mind is enough to achieve orgasm, though it might only express itself as a kind of juddering in the temporal lobes. I felt I needed someone a little more vital, someone who lived in their body more. Not Mellors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame, maybe – but someone with appetite.
SUMMER, YEAR ONE
One evening, walking the halls of a dating site, looking in doorways and finding other doors firmly closed to me, I began talking to a man called Oliver, who – if that really was him in the photograph – was six foot three and darkly handsome. He was also twenty years younger than me. Prior to his first message he’d looked at my profile almost every day for weeks, unaware or else unbothered that the site notches up each viewing. It got to the point that he’d visited twenty-three times. What’s he thinking? I asked myself each time he came back and looked at my page; what’s he deciding? Is it the picture? Is it my age? The alpha-control-freak intellectual-snob thing? Eventually there was a message.
It said: ‘Hello, how are you?’
This is lazy, as opening gambits go. It gives away nothing while asking for a lot, and is fundamentally unanswerable. What was he asking for – the news that my glands were up, that my bank balance was precarious, that I couldn’t find a novel I wanted to read next, and that I’d put on a swimsuit earlier that day and said, Oh God in heaven, no? I think what he really hoped for was: ‘Feeling horny, shall we meet at a Holiday Inn and screw?’ The best reply