So the next evening when he asked how I was tonight, instead of saying, ‘Fine thanks, you?’ I sent him an even longer answer, with reference to meals eaten, energy levels, lengths swum, the working day and the outrageous cost of a Fry’s chocolate cream at the corner shop: 80p! That’s 16 shillings! (He took my quaint shilling talk in his stride, perhaps aware that it was intended to emphasise our age difference.) I asked him how his day had gone. There was no response.
The next day there he was again. ‘How are you today?’
‘I could tell you,’ I wrote, ‘but what’s the point? You never talk back.’
‘You’re very attractive, do you want to meet for dinner?’ he answered. ‘Tonight?’
I said I couldn’t, sorry. And besides I’d already eaten. (I hadn’t. It was a lie.)
‘So what are you doing now?’ he typed.
‘Sprawled on the sofa with a book,’ I wrote, unguardedly.
‘Mmm. I like the idea of you sprawled.’
‘Ha,’ I typed back, completely unnerved. ‘But you are way too young for me.’
‘Girls bore me,’ he wrote. ‘I’m more interested in women, real women like you. Looking forward to our first date. Saturday?’
‘I can’t this week,’ I replied. I was sure that Oliver would take one look at me and run, which was a pity, because in many respects he was absolutely what the doctor would have ordered, if the doctor was a middle-aged woman who hadn’t had sex for quite a while. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ I said. It wasn’t even that I was interested in him. But I was determined to win this one. Online dating can be gladiatorial and I was determined not to be one of the Christians, munched up by a suave and smarmy lion.
‘You can find out all about me over dinner,’ he wrote.
The next day, there he was again. ‘How are you tonight?’ he asked.
Fine, thanks, I said. I left it at that.
He responded in real time, in twenty seconds – we were now having a real-time conversation on the screen. He wrote: ‘When we go to dinner, will you be wearing a skirt?’
‘Probably, or a dress. Why?’
‘Will it be short?’
‘Unlikely.’
‘Will you wear stockings, so I can put my hand under your skirt as we’re having a drink?’
‘That’s forward.’
‘I bet you have gorgeous long legs. Are they long?’
‘Not really,’ I lied. I am way out of my depth here, I thought.
‘And will you wear heels?’
‘Probably not. I might wear heeled boots.’
‘Wear heels, a short skirt and stockings, just for me.’
‘Oliver, I’m not really a heels and stockings kind of a woman,’ I wrote. ‘To be honest, I get kind of sick of all these clichés of femininity.’ I knew this reply broke one of the iron laws of online dating – pomposity! – but I was sick of them.
‘I have total respect for that,’ Oliver wrote. ‘It’s a good point.’
A thirty-second silence fell, while I contemplated his response, and he contemplated it also. I broke the silence. ‘Why aren’t you taking a woman your own age out to dinner?’
‘Women my own age want marriage and babies. I don’t want marriage and babies.’
‘Ah.’
‘Meet me.’
‘Not now. But some time. Maybe.’
‘You like to play hard to get, then.’
‘Hard to get? We’ve barely said hello. Tell me more about yourself. Something. Anything.’
He didn’t reply, but for ages afterwards there were near-daily messages wanting to know how I was. I stopped responding, other than to ask him, twice, why he kept doing it: what was in it for him? He didn’t say. It was mystifying.
I had a chat with two friends who were also ‘listed’. (This was the shorthand we’d developed for discussing online dating. ‘Is X listed?’ ‘Yes, she’s been listed for over a year.’) One of them couldn’t help but be amused about my discussing ‘the search for the One’. ‘You don’t really think men are looking for the One, do you?’ she asked me. (She had become cynical by then.) ‘For most of them, sex with a lot of people and avoiding being in a couple is precisely the point of the exercise.’ According to her, men were treating these sites like a giant sweet shop, and were picking bagfuls of sweets. Some of them were tasting in order to whittle the choice to one, she conceded, but others had begun a bachelor life of new sweets every weekend, and had no intention of stopping for anyone. ‘Men see the sea of faces on dating sites and think, All these women are basically saying, “You can have sex with me if you want,” but I don’t think that’s what most of us are saying.’ The woman in the group who’d been dating the longest said she understood the male perspective. It wasn’t just men who were behaving that way. She was too. ‘I find I’m the same these days. I find someone nice but then I get drawn back in. There is always the possibility of someone better. It’s difficult to draw a line.’
Sometimes a Sunday was spent at home, trawling the listings in my pyjamas, sitting cross-legged and eating leftover Chinese takeaway (and every other food not nailed down in the fridge). It’s easy to become obsessive about the online dating search. It’s like the kind of feverishness that can grab you when you’ve sold one house and can’t find another. The process becomes compulsive, until eventually, inevitably, you begin to reconsider places that you put in the No pile. Hours could pass unnoticed in the time spent ‘just popping in’ to a dating site. I found myself scrolling through the hundreds of faces on screen, all of them saying (at least theoretically), ‘Talk to me; I’m here, I’m free, I’m looking for someone to love, and it might be you.’
But maybe not this one: ‘I like my independence but I’d also like a certain kind of female company on my days off.’ Or this one: ‘Living the dream working in a call centre, and need something to come home to other than existential despair.’ Though he received a comradely pat on the shoulder.
In online dating there is such a thing as a kind lie. It’s sent in response to an unwanted approach, as a sort of kindly meant shorthand. It’s a brush-off that’s politely worded, designed to avoid hurt. It avoids listing the nine reasons why you don’t want to have coffee. Usually I’d say something like, ‘I’ve just begun seeing someone and am only here checking my messages, but thank you, I was flattered, and good luck.’ In online dating, the kind lie is vital. I wish the men who use the sites understood this. I’d much rather be sent the kind lie than be ignored. Being ignored doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, not interested,’ so much as ‘You are beneath my notice.’ It says, ‘You’re not worth fifteen seconds of my life.’ It might also say, ‘At your age and non-thin, you need to lower your sights somewhat; please take my non-reply as a hint.’ These are not good thoughts to be sent swirling into the 3 a.m. insomnia of a person with flat-lining morale.
Ignoring is just bloody rude. None of the men who didn’t reply would blank me if I said hello to them at a party: why should the internet be different? At a party you’d be polite in a style that indicated, in a grown-up way, that you weren’t romantically interested. You’d say you must mingle, and you’d move on. You’d give the impression of being already attached. These are kind lies we all use in life. But perhaps when they’re online, some people behave in a way that they would all the time if they could get away with it. Perhaps there’s a gloriously