A friend suggested internet dating. She’d been doing it for two years. Most people in the online pool were odd, or dull or nuts, or love rats, she said, (I assumed she was exaggerating), but it was a lot more fun than slippers, Sudoku and the gramophone.
I signed up to the biggest of the no-cost 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, and offering fascinating glimpses of my inner world. 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. It said “Hi” and was followed by nine inappropriate kisses. I had a look at Freddie’s profile. All he’d written was “Honest, caring, tactile man, looking for sensual woman. Please no game players, gold diggers, cheats or serial liars.”
Most people’s profiles say nothing about them. They could be anyone. Everybody loves holidays and music and films and food, and wants to travel the world. Everyone has a good sense of humour, works hard and likes country weekends; everybody loves a sofa, a DVD and a bottle of wine. So far, so conventional. But sometimes the people who have a lot to say about themselves can prove the more dangerous. Inside the anonymity of a dating site, nothing can be taken at face value. That might not even be his face.
Once you realise this, it becomes ever more obvious that you really have little idea who you’re talking to. Recently, I had a conversation that lasted weeks with an engaging, cultured, witty man who was a lecturer at a university, until I checked and found that he wasn’t. When I told the dating friend, she said: “Sometimes I’m confident and sometimes taking on a second-hand man is like going to the dog refuge and picking a stray, not knowing what its real history is or how it might react under pressure.”
At first I signed up to every mainstream site I could find and afford, a total of nine (since whittled down to four, only two of them fee-paying). Online dating is big business and it’s easy to see why. Basically, it’s money for old rope. If you build it, they will come. Create a search engine and a messaging system, then stand back and let people find one another. It’s a great big dance hall, though without the alcohol or the band. Or the hall.
I started with men in my own city, of about the same age, education and outlook. This didn’t go well. The last thing most divorced men want is women of the same age, education and outlook. You protest: this is unfair. I can only tell you of my own experience, which is that mid-life men have high expectations, a situation exacerbated by being outnumbered three to one by women. But I didn’t know this then. I was like a labrador let off its lead at the park, bounding up to people expecting to make friends. A chatty introduction email went off to a dozen men who lived within a five-mile radius. When there were no replies, I couldn’t believe it. I thought something was wrong with the message system, but found one of the non-repliers had removed the three things from his likes and dislikes list that I’d mentioned I also liked. Withnail & I, dark chocolate, rowing boats: all deleted. Another man had blocked me so I couldn’t write again. This was awful and humiliating. There’s nothing like being judged unworthy even of being replied to that’s so powerful a reminder that, in this context, you’re essentially a commodity.
Not that this is everyone’s experience. I know of dating site marriages. Well, one. Admittedly the woman in question is a goddess. The goddesses (at least the under-40 ones) are probably swamped with offers. But I’m 50, and not the cheek-bony sort of 50 with swishy hair, either. All the dating-site gods (tall, articulate, successful, well-travelled; they don’t even have to be handsome) were swishing right past me.
I asked my friend Jack for a male appraisal of my dating site profile. He said it was lovely, like me. That was worrying. I needed clarification.
“Well. You expect a lot. You make it clear you only want clever, funny, high-achieving men.”
“I don’t say high-achieving. I don’t say that anywhere.”
“You say it without saying it. And it’s clear you’re successful. You’re alpha. That puts men off. I’m just saying.”
“So what should I do? Claim to be a flight attendant with a love of seamed stockings?”
“That would get you a lot of attention. But then you’d need to follow through.”
“I’d have to study the British Airways flight routes and talk about layovers.”
“Every middle-aged man in the world dreams of layovers,” Jack said, looking wistful.
He helped rewrite the copy so that I sounded more fun, though not as fun as Jack wanted me to sound. There was an immediate response.
“Reading between the lines, I think you’re holding out for something unusual. I believe I’m atypical. For a start, I don’t have a television. When I had one I spent a lot of time shouting at it.” I said I couldn’t bear to watch Question Time either. “No, no,” he said. “Countryfile, for instance. Countryfile’s really annoying.” I asked him what he did in the evenings. He said he spent a lot of time with his lizards.
I told the dating site veteran that I was having a poor response rate to the advertisement for my heart and soul. She was shocked that I was admitting to being 50. I should change it and say I was 40; lots of men had a search cut-off point of 40 and weren’t even seeing me on their lists. I considered this. Did I want those kind of men, who judged people by their numbers? Would waist measurement be the next thing? Another friend said that the first friend was right. When she was truthful and said she was 54, she’d heard only from 70-year-olds. The 54-year-old men were all talking to the 35-year-olds, though they’d consider women of 40 at a push. “List yourself at 40 and confess to 50 later,” she said. “I did it. Nobody minded. They were doing it themselves, to beat the system.”
I had qualms. “Don’t have qualms; it’s routine. Women knock 10 years off their age, and men add three inches.”
During the week that I was 40, my mailbox filled up. The trouble was, they were all messages from men who thought I was 40. When I confessed, nobody wanted to meet. One man said that he’d guessed; in fact, wasn’t 50 a bit of a stretch? He thought I was probably older than that. The fourth strung me along a while. What kind of 50 was I? I was a spirited, cool, unusual 50, I said (desperately). I still wore plimsolls and had a silly sense of humour, I said, citing Monty Python. I still bopped to 80s classics in the kitchen. “Good for you, but I’m not interested, not remotely,” he wrote. “I’m not ever going to embark on a relationship that began with a lie.”
The first dinner offer came from Trevor, an American expat in London. Trevor had been dumped and was only just passing out of denial and into acceptance, he said. He was doing the work but it was hard. Four thousand words of backstory followed. In return, I gave him mine. Another great long email arrived, talking philosophically about life and quoting writers. It was charming, endearing; I reciprocated with my own thoughts, quoting other writers. We were all set. Then, the day before dinner, he cancelled. The last line of his message said: “To be honest, I’m not interested in a woman who’s my intellectual equal.”
The first real-world meeting was for coffee, in town, in the afternoon, with an HR manager who was between meetings. A short, sharp interview that I failed. I didn’t mind too much. He was horrible: pursed-mouthed, unforthcoming, with dyed black hair and the demeanour of a vampire. Determined to exorcise the bad first date, I agreed to another, with an apparently jaunty tax specialist. Ahead of me in the queue, he bought only his own cappuccino and cake, leaving me to get mine, and then for 20 minutes I heard all about the many, many times he’d seen U2, related one concert at a time. By then my cup was empty. In all sorts of ways, my cup seemed to be empty.
Most of the encounters so far, on screen and in life, have been like this. Some have been worse, though one was a success so tremendous (a restaurant that turned into dancing, a walk by the river and a glorious snog) that I couldn’t sleep, imagining our life together, a fantasy outcome put to an end when he cut me dead.
Talking people into being interested in you before meeting – that’s where you might expect the internet to excel. That could work in a middle-aged woman’s favour, circumventing the evident shock of her in person. As Jack keeps telling me, men are visual creatures. He’s doubtful about the Scheherazade strategy, one involving telling stories and general email and phone-based bewitchment. Nonetheless, I’m sticking with plan A. I’m going to be quirky and bright, and a little bit alpha. Mostly, I’m going to continue to be 50; shortly 51. I’m hopeful of finding someone eventually. I’m just hoping it won’t take 1,001 nights.
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