Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Stella Grey 2016

Stella Grey asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

Cover photograph © Getty Images / Felicity McCabe; Design by Anna Morrison

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008201739

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008201746

Version: 2017-04-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Twitter Comments

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Trying to Write the Right Profile

First Bites and Backbites

Sex and Sensibility

The Packaging

Out in Open Water

Fundamental Ironies of the Game

Landings on Islands

Back in the Fray

The Day I Decided to Quit

And Then He Kissed Me

What Happened Next

693 Days

A Final Dedication

About the Publisher

Twitter Comments

COMMENTS RECEIVED VIA TWITTER, WHILE THE COLUMN WAS RUNNING IN THE GUARDIAN

From @RebNew1: It’s been a relief knowing it’s not just me who’s gone through these scenarios.

From @carolineratner: I recently suggested a newly single friend read you from the beginning so she knew what to expect from dating.

From @CharleneWhite, ITV news anchor: This has been one of my fav regular weekend reads. Love it. Thanks for sharing.

From @patriciajrogers: Thank you for all those weeks of laughing, wincing and nodding knowingly to your column. Parallel experiences start to end.

From @caracourage: You’ve written words I’ve taken to heart, on the self in dating.

From @gnasherwell: Your column/twitter has made me feel normal.

From @catherineaman1: I feel like you’ve gone with me into the maelstrom, as an entertaining & kind companion.

From @theflossietp: Sad your column is ending, but at least it won’t feel like you’ve been reading my journal any more!

From @Newhall70: I can relate to so much of this. #stillsearching

From @helwels: Thanks for the reassurance that all the idiots weren’t ‘just me’.

From @missinformed11: As a woman of a similar age in a similar situation, the IT’S NOT JUST ME Factor was huge!

From @accentdialectuk: I’ve grown to feel just as ritual-adoring with your column as some people feel about The Archers.

From @adrianalemus: Even as a 20-something I could identify. Stella Grey might not be a typical heroine, but the wit, honesty, and her self-awareness of her own attributes and flaws made me see a woman to aspire to be, in her.

From @NesreenMSalem: I’ve had to resort to writing satires to make sense of the absurdity of my experience. Yours were less crazy & made me realise that I’m probably not doing it right …

From @SarahABGee: I suspect that many (most?) of us could share similar tales … you were never alone.

From @dellvink: I hope you get a movie rights offer. It would be great. A grown up UK romcom.

THERE WERE ALSO MEN WHO COULD RELATE

From @nickodyson: Highly recommended for the romantically inclined, and believers in hope.

From @GervaseWebb: I loved the final column. It should be printed out and given to everyone; male or female, over 50 or under.

Outlandish though some of the following events and conversations may seem, they were real events and conversations, which took place over two years. This is not a work of fiction, nor fictionalised (although I can see why some people might think so). Names have been changed and some other identifying details, so as to protect those involved, including myself. Stella Grey is a pseudonym.

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.

Introduction

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 was more sites and more variety, so I signed up to every worthwhile-looking one I could find and afford, a total of nine. (As time went on I whittled this down to four, with occasional forays into a fifth and sixth; and then, in the second phase, somewhat desperately, I added another eight.) It was quite an expensive endeavour. 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 dancing, or the band. Or the hall. Generally what you’re paying for is access to their database, though some sites claim to work hard on your behalf by matching people ‘scientifically’ via hundreds of questions (this didn’t work for me, as you will see).

I decided that I was going to have to be pro-active and start some conversations, rather than sitting waiting for men to come to me. In general, men were not coming to me. I’d launched myself into the scene expecting to make some kind of an impression, but made very little impact. It was like bursting into a party dressed to the nines, ready armed with funny stories, and saying, ‘TA DAAA!’ and having almost everybody ignore you (other than the people asking everybody for naked pictures and hook-ups. I didn’t count them in my success rate). Something had to be done to kick-start the process, so I began to take the initiative. 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 appeared to be looking for was women of the same age, education and outlook. You may protest that this is a wild generalisation and is unfair. I can only tell you of my own experience, which is that they have high expectations, a situation exacerbated by being heavily outnumbered 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 candidates who lived within a five-mile radius. When there were no replies, I thought something must be wrong with the message system. Then I found that one of the non-repliers had removed the three items from his likes and dislikes list that I’d mentioned I also liked. Withnail & I, dark chocolate, rowing boats: all had been deleted. Another of the men had blocked me so I couldn’t write to him again. This, I have to tell you, stung me deeply. It winded me. I hadn’t realised online dating was like this.

After the initial sting, I had the first experience of certainty. I was sure that I’d found him, the man for me. Graham had a lovable face and an attractive sort of gravitas (he was a senior civil servant). He wrote well, and lived a mere five miles away. His profile echoed my own, in the things he said, believed, wanted. We were 100 per cent compatible. Being a novice, I was sure he would see me in the same way. I thought, This is it; I’ve done it; here he is. It was an obvious match! I wrote him a long message about myself, a letter, picking up points of similarity and initiating what I was confident would be lively conversation. I was almost debilitated by excitement. It was the beginning of something wonderful, of that I was sure. But I was wrong, completely wrong. It wasn’t the beginning of anything. Graham didn’t even reply. Not realising that ignoring compatible people who’d taken the trouble to write a letter of many paragraphs might even be an option (people did that?), I checked my inbox over and over for the following forty-eight hours. It seemed clear that the only possible reasons his enthusiastic response had been delayed were that he was a) away, or b) too crazy-busy to write his rapturous reply. But that wasn’t it. Graham had read my message and dismissed it. I never heard from him, not a word – though he came and had a look at me. Twice. He looked at my profile page, at what I said about myself and at my picture, and then he looked again, and then he decided to ignore me. So this was the first thing I learned: men I had an instant attraction to, and who sounded like thoroughly decent people, could actually be arseholes. That was Lesson One.

Because I had more or less talked myself into being horribly smitten, and because I’d given so much of myself in my lengthy approach letter, Graham’s decision not even to answer my email hit me hard. I’d been judged unworthy of a reply. It was a powerful first hint that in this context, essentially I might be thought to be a commodity, one not much in demand at that. I felt hurt. I had feelings. This unreal situation was prompting real emotions, ones I didn’t want to have. One of the problems with online dating is that it facilitates those who want to dehumanise the process just as much as it facilitates the romantic and genuine. The system, like any other, is a hard cold thing. People can take refuge in that, in the machine, in the distancing and anonymising that’s built in to protect them. But they can also exploit it. My own response to these initial hard knocks was that I began to expect a lot less. I wrote shorter approach messages, while still taking trouble to personalise them: ‘Hello there, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your profile, and also to say, the book you say you never tire of is the book I never tire of too. Have you read the sequel?’ The recipient didn’t reply. Ever.

It wasn’t only the way people behaved on dating sites that astounded me, but also the descriptions some gave of themselves there. Perhaps it’s social media’s fault that lots of men have embraced the power of the inspirational quote. Sometimes these are attached to names at every sign-off (Gary ‘Love life and grasp and hold on to it every day xxx’). Some had profiles that I suspect were drafted by their 14-year-old sisters. ‘My favourite things are the crinkle of the leaves under my shoes in autumn and birdsong after the rain.’ ‘I don’t care about beauty,’ another had written. ‘As long as you have a beautiful soul I want to hear from you.’ I was charmed. I wrote to tell him I was charmed. He didn’t reply; perhaps what he wanted was inner beauty attached to a 30-year-old body. Another early correspondent was enraged about my preference for tall men. He wrote me a one-line message: ‘Your insistence on dating men over 6 feet tall is heightist.’

I explained that I am taller than that in shoes. ‘I’m a tall woman,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if you have an equal-opportunities-oriented approach to sex, but I like to look up to a man when I kiss him. I continue to allow myself that preference. Apologies if that offends.’

‘You know the average height of men in the UK is 5'10 don’t you,’ he replied. That happened to be his own height.

‘Luckily I’m not interested in averages,’ I wrote.

‘You may as well ask for an albino who’s a billionaire,’ he countered.

It was hard to know how to reply to that, so I didn’t. I always replied to a first approach, unless there was something vile about it, but didn’t feel obliged to keep responding to people who replied to my reply, and especially not those I’d said no thank you to. Otherwise some pointless conversations would never have ended.

I paused at the smiling face of a man called Dave who lived in Kent. ‘Hi I’m Dave, an ordinary bloke, 43 years old and ready for a serious relationship.’ What caught my eye was that Dave was 52. The age updated automatically on the heading of the page, though he hadn’t updated the personal statement that appeared beneath it. His description had been written a full nine years ago. ‘Oh God,’ I said aloud. ‘Dave’s been here for nine years!’ Poor Dave. ‘I hope you find someone soon, Dave,’ I said to the screen. ‘Unless you’re a bad man, obviously, in which case womankind has made its judgement and you should probably take the hint.’

Most people’s dating site profiles say little about them. Some real-world interesting people have no gift for self-description and fall back on the generic; some people are careful to be bland and unspecific; and others are actually as dull as their blurb suggests. It can be tricky to deduce which of the three you’re dealing with, at first or even second glance. There are those who appear to say a lot, but actually give nothing away. 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. Then there’s the problem of integrity. Some things that are said might prove not to be true: marital status for example, or age, or location, or general intentions (or height). ‘I’m looking for my soulmate,’ doesn’t always mean exactly that. Sometimes it decodes as I’m not looking for my soulmate, but that’s what chicks want to hear. Inside the anonymity of the database, nothing can be relied on at face value. I’m not suggesting there are grounds for constant paranoia, but I learned to be on the alert. In the early days I had a conversation with a professor at a certain university, and checked the campus website and found that he wasn’t. When I challenged him his dating profile disappeared and my emails weren’t any longer answered. When I told a friend – who was also searching for someone – about this, 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.’

Not that this is everyone’s experience of online romance. I know of dating site marriages … well, I know of one. Admittedly the woman in question is a goddess. The goddesses, the willowy ones with the cheekbones and the swishy hair, are probably swamped with offers. As for me, 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,’ he said. ‘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 that 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 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 in the inbox. ‘Reading between the lines, I think you’re holding out for something unusual,’ one said. ‘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 replied that 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.

It was a grim Tuesday night, the rain lashing down. I went in search of someone friendlier. There were lots of men who claimed to be the life and soul of the party, but who looked like serial killers on Wanted posters. In general, using a bad passport photograph to illustrate your page isn’t the best of all possible plans. I rummaged through the first five candidates the system had offered and had a look at what they had to say. ‘Scientific facts are never true. If you know why scientific facts are never true, you might be the girl for me.’ ‘Still looking for the right one, a woman who won’t expect me to be at her beck and call.’ ‘Second hand male, in fairly good condition despite last careless owner.’ ‘I am a complex person, too complex to explain here, a hundred different men in one. If you want a dull life you are wasting your time. Move along – nothing to see here.’ ‘Looking for intelligence, co-operation and a natural blonde.’ (Co-operation?)

Perhaps, I thought, I should narrow the search, by ticking some of the boxes for interests. A search based on ticking ‘Current Affairs’ brought up a raft of virtue-signallers. ‘I’m dedicated to the pursuit of justice for all and hate political unfairness.’ ‘The top three things I hate are liars, deceit and war.’ (Whereas, presumably, the rest of us are assumed to approve of wars and lying.) Then I had a brief conversation with a man who said he loved world cinema. I messaged him asking what kind of films he liked. Back came the reply: ‘Hi thanks for asking, my favourite movies are Driller Killer, The Lair of the White Worm, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, Cabaret and The Blood-Spattered Bride.’

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 (the therapeutic work on himself, he meant), but was finding it hard. Four thousand words of backstory followed this statement, and in return, I gave him mine. A few hours after this 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, Trevor cancelled. The last line of his message said: ‘To be honest, I’m not interested in a woman who’s my intellectual equal.’ (I know this sounds as if it might not be true, but I’m sorry to tell you that it is.) He added that he felt honesty was the best policy. I didn’t like to tell him what my policy was, but right then and there it could easily have involved a plank, a pirate ship, a shark-infested sea and a long pointy stick.

The first real-world meeting was for a coffee in town in the afternoon with an HR manager, between his meetings: a short, sharp interview that I failed. I didn’t mind too much. He was 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 twenty minutes I heard all about the many, many times he’d seen U2, told one concert at a time. By then my cup was empty. In all sorts of ways my cup seemed to be empty.

It wasn’t just the bad dates that were ending badly. I had a good date that also ended badly: a success so tremendous – dinner that led into dancing, and after that a walk by the river, and then a glorious snog – that I couldn’t sleep afterwards, but lay awake imagining our life together, a fantasy outcome put to an end by his cutting me dead. Sometimes people have one great date with someone and that’s enough for them. A series of great first dates is all they’re hoping for; that’s all they need. I hadn’t anticipated this, not anything like this. I came from a much more straightforward, more traditional dating culture in which people got together at discos and parties and via friends of friends, and stayed together for a long time. We were open with one another, back then, and love was fairly simple.

I decided that what I’d do was establish a real friendship with men, over email and text and sometimes even over the phone (I’ve never liked the phone), before agreeing to meet them. Talking people into being interested in you before meeting – that’s where you might expect the internet to excel. That could be a process designed to work in a middle-aged woman’s favour, circumventing the shock of her physical self when a man met her in person. Undeniably, I had been a shock to some men I’d met, and I wasn’t the only one to have had that experience (look, I’m not particularly hideous). I’d been talking to other women of around my age who had found the very same. It was agreed that there were notable (noble) exceptions, but in general men had expectations that a woman who’d ‘put herself out there’ would dedicate time, effort and money to her appearance, so as to compete. Some men are of the opinion that the whole physical manifestation of a woman on the earth should amount to an A–Z of efforts to please, and that we’re all madly in competition with one another. There are men who think that’s all that lipstick means. There are tabloid newspapers that suggest that’s all that clothes mean, and who divide women into goat and sheep camps, the frumpy and those who flaunt themselves. There have been men, in the course of this quest, who have been openly scandalised about my lack of commitment to looking younger. But then as Jack kept telling me, ‘Men are visual creatures.’ He was doubtful about the Scheherazade strategy, one involving telling stories and general email-based bewitchment. Nonetheless, I resolved to stick with plan A. I decided that I would be quirky, and bright, and a little bit alpha, and I was going to be my real age, for as long as it took. Initial disappointments wouldn’t deter me. I was going to beat the system and find the man I’d want to be with for the rest of my life. I was just hoping it wouldn’t take another 1001 nights.

Trying to Write the Right Profile

Here’s my first attempt at a dating profile. The additions in bold in brackets are my reactions to reading it now.

ABOUT ME

Tall, dark, reasonably handsome woman, just turned 50, hoping for second love after the end of a long marriage. (Is tall, dark and handsome a bit of a macho way to introduce yourself? I’m trying for witty, but I think I’m just coming off as annoying, to misquote Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story.) Intelligent, lively, curious, bookish. Not a skinny person. I’m just saying. Not obese either, but if slender is your type, then I might literally be too much to handle. (Christ, no, that’s not even funny.)

WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR

A tall, clever, funny, loyal, lovely man. (Not much to ask, is it?) Ideally, someone to grow old with. Someone bookish, good-humoured, sociable, kind. (You should probably have written: ‘Happiness; not interested in flings’. That’s probably enough.) I have a bit of a thing for big sturdy academics who rock a linen jacket. (Oh no.)

MUSIC

My music likes are catholic, as in wide-ranging and not as in Vatican City. (You’ve just offended somebody.) Jimi Hendrix, Kathleen Ferrier, Pat Metheny, Philip Glass, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads and all the usual classical. Not really an opera person. Fond of seventies and eighties tracks that remind me of being a student. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Glen Campbell, Velvet Underground, John Martyn, Blue Nile, Marvin Gaye, Blondie, Pretenders, The Cure, David Bowie. Very fond of wordless film scores and ambient. Favourite guilty secret: Fleetwood Mac. (Accurate enough, though you’ve completely omitted the jazz you listen to all day. And I’m not really sure why you’ve written all this.)

BOOKS

Usually have a book stuck to my face. British and American nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the usual retinue of greatness: Dickens, Austen, Brontë, Wharton, James. Oh, and those Russian chaps, and those French chaps (that you don’t read much. Plus, your cuteness is already annoying). Currently on the bedside: Michel Faber, Richard Ford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Fitzgerald, Franzen, Forster, Iris Murdoch. Larkin and Eliot. Art books. A.N. Wilson’s The Victorians. (This is true but you might be trying too hard. Perfectly nice men who read only 99p Kindle thrillers will be deterred. It doesn’t matter what you read or what other people read.)

FILMS

Twelve random Desert Island films: Local Hero, Some Like It Hot, Philadelphia Story, Annie Hall, Hero, Blazing Saddles, Two Days in Paris, Stranger than Fiction, Rocky Horror, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, A Night at the Opera, All About My Mother, Blade Runner. (Except that’s thirteen.) I’m a big fan of world cinema of all sorts. Guilty pleasures: The Bourne franchise, popcorn thrillers.

FOOD

Basically Nigella. (You are embarrassing.) Very greedy and eat almost anything (you’re saying you’re fat). Cooking and eating are important, as you will see immediately you meet me. (You keep telling the boys that you’re fat, you know.) World food rather than just traditional British, though in reality there’s a lot of chicken. In summer, fish and chips out of the paper while sitting on a sea wall. Restaurant pick for a blowout dinner – mussels to start, venison or duck, lots of cheese, a clever chocolate pudding. And wine. Lots of wine. Garlic with everything except custard. Death Row meal: steak and sweet potato fries. (Really not clear why you’ve written down any of this.)

ART

I’m an art nut and go to galleries a lot. I have trouble with some of the conceptual stuff but am not completely ungroovy. (Oh God.) I’ve even admired the occasional video installation. I like primitive art, Renaissance art, nineteenth-century art, early/mid twentieth-century modernism. I like abstraction, colour, some expressive work. Howard Hodgkin. (At this point you’ve probably deterred people who think this is a spec, rather than just your own ramblings.)

HOME

Home means a lot, physically and as an idea. I like to decorate, in different senses of the word. (No, me neither.) Having said that, heading off with a rucksack and being forced to be a world citizen would probably be good for me. At home I feel the pull between sleek functionality and a more cluttered, wildly coloured nineteenth-century approach with some Moroccan-boho touches. (A chap might wonder if you’re asking to be housed and to be given a furnishing budget, at this point.)

TV AND RADIO

Radio 3 and 4. Not a live-TV watcher, in general. Low tolerance for commercials. No tolerance for reality television, of any sort. I like thrillers, crime, suspense, psychological. Quite partial to the occasional bonnet drama (I don’t mean cars). Culture and science docs. (You sound like a media snob. But that is accurate enough.)

PLACES

I haven’t been to enough places. I know bits of Europe well and tend to return to them. Ideal holiday: a place with swimming plus exploring opportunities, interleaving history/travel days with relaxing days. Wild swimming fan: lakes and rivers often preferred to beaches. No interest in the Caribbean or tanning. I want to see more of the world. (Add that trekking in Nepal and Machu Picchu are not on the list.) I want to see ‘Arabia’ as the nineteenth-century explorers saw it. (Do not say this – people will delight in misunderstanding it.)

POLITICS

Sensible-compassionate left-middle. (Don’t use the word compassionate about yourself. Or charismatic, come to that.)

SPORT

No. Unless you count walking the dog. Or watching Wimbledon and Six Nations rugby. On the television. On the couch. (This is brave, perhaps, but necessary. Too many midlife men are gym-oriented.) I cycle, but rarely uphill.

WEEKENDS

An ideal weekend: eating, reading, going out for a mooch and a coffee, dipping into a museum, going to the cinema, making dinner and drinking wine. Or: off to a wild green place for walking and the pub. Or: gardens and NT houses with tearooms. Weekends away in B&Bs. Walks on the beach in winter. (Beaches in winter are a total dating cliché.)

What I think when I read this over now is: I wonder how many people thought they wouldn’t fit the bill, because they watched, read or did the wrong things, and because they interpreted a detailed account of myself as an equally detailed wish list. In a way this can’t be helped: the whole point is to give an idea of what you’re like and how you tick. It’s very difficult to get it right. Some of the reactions I had to this first attempt were, ‘Well, you’re not expecting a lot, are you?’ (sarcasm) and, ‘You come over as a smug middle-class bitch.’ But, you see, I wasn’t interested in the sort of men who would write to women to tell them that. So, perhaps, although some of the above is cringe-worthy, it’s on the right tack, in being personal, at least. Smugly middle class and with high expectations, maybe – but personal, at least.

First Bites and Backbites

SPRING, YEAR ONE

So, the plan was to make a man fall a little bit in love with me by email before we met. The idea was that this would make me feel less nervous about meeting a stranger.

The project didn’t start well. The first attempt was utterly doomed, because the man in question wasn’t a communicator. To Ralph, texting was for making social arrangements, and emailing was for making more long-winded social arrangements, and he didn’t grasp that both could be used as a form of foreplay. I’m not saying this was a bad thing, per se. Each to their own. But yes, Ralph and I were a mismatch, in this and in other ways. I persisted, though, for five weeks and seven dates, because he was an incredible kisser. We’re talking world-class osculation. It was the kind of kissing that could turn a person’s head and make them conclude, totally wrongly, that a lifetime of bliss lay ahead. Sex (sixth and seventh dates) was a complete disaster, though. I don’t mean that the mechanics of it were a failure, despite the fact that I was undoubtedly a nervous wreck. It was just unsexy: weirdly, profoundly unsexy for both of us. It was odd. The kissing was our sex. The kissing was as erotic as hell. The sex, however, was more like shaking hands with your bottom.

I did wonder if Ralph had an aversion to body hair. There were men, in this story, who were enthusiastic about ‘a seventies vibe’ and there were men who had to stifle a shriek. There was a man who asked, flat out (via the messaging system) if I shaved, and who was angered by my response; my having pubic hair of any kind was rude to him, he thought, like being unshowered. The best sort of men are those who don’t give a shit how much hair you have, or where. (Listen, chaps – try having your pubes ripped out with hot wax, on a regular ‘maintenance’ basis, before declaring a preference.)

So, things didn’t work out with Ralph. For him, perhaps it was that I didn’t have the pudendum of a 10-year-old girl. For me, it was his lack of interest in talking when we were apart that killed the urge to keep trying. He was perfectly friendly when we were face to face, but terse or silent between dates. A goldfish, in online dating terms. Often he ignored texts and emails, and if he replied at all it was usually three words, using his catchphrase: ‘Catch you later!’ I sent him an email one night telling him about a bad day, and his reply was: ‘Looking forward to catching you soon!’ I’m sorry if this sounds needy, but I needed more. Six words seemed like they might indicate a lack of interest.

Not that I could make claims to be the norm from which Ralph was deviating. Ralph had no way of knowing that I was emotionally rather catlike in needing frequent small meals of love. He had unwittingly stepped into a game in which he wasn’t really aware of the rules. I texted him after date number six, asking if we were still on for Friday. ‘Yes! Looking forward to catching up with you!’ the reply said. He’d signed it with his full name, including his surname. Who writes their surname on a text? Did he think I’d need to distinguish him from all the other Ralphs I was seeing?

So, date number seven came, and we had our romantic dinner, in candlelight, and talked about work. It was a dull evening – to be honest they had all been dull – but I was determined not to give up. There was the kissing to consider. There was the whole ‘having a boyfriend at last’ thing to consider, too. I’m not by nature a quitter. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘do you think … could we talk a bit more, between dates, so that we’re a bit more in touch with the day-to-day, what’s happening and what we’re thinking? I’d enjoy that.’

‘Sure,’ he said, scrutinising the wine list.

We had weird unsexy sex, and later on, back at home, having soaked in the bath, naked in fresh crisp sheets, I texted him saying that I was warm and naked in bed, just bathed, feeling restless and thinking of him. He didn’t reply. The following night, having turned out my light, I texted that I was thinking of him. That was all I said: ‘Thinking of you.’ The response was: ‘You take care!’ (Seriously. Really.)

It occurred to me that I frightened Ralph. Ralph was scared. It began to look, at the very least, like an unusually short attention span. Whatever the actual diagnosis, I knew it wasn’t going to last even a week longer. I needed romance, of some sort, some sense of a progression, some inkling of a relationship. I needed more than a fuck-buddy who didn’t want a friend. And that’s why I went quiet. I stopped texting and emailing, leaving a vacuum, to see what Ralph would fill it with. Ralph didn’t fill it with anything. It was easy come easy go, and it came and it went. Nothing was put to an end because essentially nothing had begun. He wasn’t in touch again, and that was that. It was as if the whole thing had been a hallucination.

I did start to wonder, at that early point, if a middle-aged woman on a dating site might be considered as really only useful as a fuck-buddy. I did wonder if men assumed I would know that, and that I’d take what I could get. I didn’t get a lot of messages unless I’d written first, and those I did receive tended to be only a notch beyond grunting. ‘How About It Darlin, You and Me? Xxxxxxxx’ There are plenty of men online who think a woman over 45 will react to the offer of a shag in an alley with tears of gratitude.

Men online use kisses, all the time; perhaps they picked up the habit on social media, where women who don’t know each other and will never meet have developed intricate hierarchies of kissing. This is a cultural shift. I’m sure men never used to scatter kisses so freely. Plus, a new function enabling people to send mass mail-outs had been introduced on one of the sites, which some men took to eagerly. It meant that they could write one message and press EMAIL ALL and have it sent to every woman they’d ticked. One such that I received acknowledged that it was a mass communication, as if that wouldn’t put us all off him, at all. ‘Hello ladies, this is Pete, I’m an average guy, like a laugh, like sofa and the telly, like my footie, like to make a lady happy, so let me know if any of you would like to take a chance on a 45 year old man: one careful owner, reasonable bodywork for age, full service history.’ Another had used the mail-out facility to get a lively competitive vibe going. He’d set us all an essay question. He wanted submissions in reply to the following: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ It wasn’t clear what the prize was.

Other messages were misdelivered. An email arrived from a man in South Wales. ‘Jessica,’ it said, ‘I knew the minute I saw your face that it was meant to be. Do you believe in love at first sight? I’m visited by intuition that I am the man for you. Send me a long message telling me all about yourself, and I’ll reply by tonight, and we can get this thing started.’

‘You’ve sent this to the wrong person,’ I replied. ‘I’m not Jessica. I’m afraid this is the hazard of using cut-and-paste.’

‘You’re the right person,’ he insisted, styling it out. ‘I’m just not very good with names.’

After this I had daily on-screen dating site conversations with a man called Alexander. He was Dutch in origin, six foot four and the kind of blond that takes grey well, and looked good in his photograph, in dark jeans and jacket and a white shirt, with a big brown satchel hooked across his body, and a floral scarf. He was unmistakably not from around here. We met first on a Sunday. Well, we didn’t really meet. All we had to go on were photographs and the usual clues: carefully veiled descriptions of who we are and where we work; our likes and dislikes; our favourite films, books, music, food, places in the world; what we’re looking for and our ideas about the future. We didn’t reveal our real identities or email addresses. We didn’t speak on the phone, or see each other talking on Skype. It was a connection built – and then dismantled – entirely by typing.

After a few days, Alexander wrote a very long message in the middle of the night, listing all the women he’d ever loved and how they’d let him down. Dates were supplied and first names, and vivid descriptions. He was 55, and his second marriage had come to an end in the spring. It failed, he said, because the children were too much; he’d realised he couldn’t handle living with young children. He’d moved out and left his wife to handle them alone, other than for a weekend a month, when he took them to the zoo, like an uncle. He wrote that he was looking for someone who would make him feel more rewarded by life than his wife had. As time went on, that sentence bothered me more and more.

There are men who will take on the role of therapist and draw you out, who’ll draw it all out of you like knotted silk handkerchiefs from a magician’s pocket. This feels wonderful at the time. It’s only afterwards that you might look back and shudder. There are people who get a kick out of owning other people; some people own others by knowing their secrets. Some men want to engage in the dance, and some men only want you to dance, while they watch you. ‘Tell me all about your past relationships and what went wrong,’ he wrote, at the end of his own exhaustive list, and, feeling pent up, feeling the thrill of letting loose and being listened to, I did. Alexander, a man I had known for less than a week, disagreed with my analysis. ‘It’s obvious to me that your ex never loved you,’ he wrote. ‘I’m beginning to see that lots of people end up married to people they don’t love, though it can take them a long time to admit to it. Adultery is often the beginning of a search for something more real, and the sex is just a smokescreen. I realise that’s been my own pattern.’

When I tried to bring the conversation to an end, Alexander became even more assertive. He said he’d taken the red pill. Dating sites are awash with men talking about the blue pill and the red pill. It’s a frame of reference taken from The Matrix: if you’ve ‘taken the blue pill’ you’re someone who doesn’t want to face reality, happy to live in your illusions, while if you’ve ‘taken the red pill’ you see the world as it really is. (You think.) Among those who claim to have ‘taken the red pill’ are men who’ve gone through a bad divorce and know all about women, how we think and why, how men behave and why: it’s all become clear to them. I told Alexander that he didn’t really know me. He disagreed. He’d come across my situation a hundred times. It was the way of things, he said. I had my first serious case of dating site revulsion. Why had I said any of what I’d said to him, and told him my history, this arrogant stranger? Though I didn’t write that. I wrote that it had been nice talking to him, and that I wished him luck. His reply said: ‘I could say that I’d be back to talk to you at a later date, like all the other arseholes, but as you’ve already gathered, I won’t be contacting you again because it’s already clear you can’t give me what I need. This isn’t what I need at this stage of my life.’ Everywhere I looked there were people who’d hit middle age and were talking about stages in their lives.

A message arrived shortly afterwards, from a man in Shetland, that took the form of a one-line quotation: ‘But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. Anon.’

‘Nice quote,’ I wrote back.

‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Most of the shadows in your life are caused by standing in your own sunshine.’

‘Corny, but possibly true,’ I wrote.

And that was that. I think I lost him at corny.

After this I went for coffee with a man called Sean. We didn’t have any kind of a lead-up. His request came out of the blue, and something about the plainness of that, the low expectations, made it easy to agree. It wasn’t a date, we said. It was just coffee, we said. (It wasn’t just coffee, of course. It was an audition.) I wasn’t hopeful, but you never know until you meet people. Plus, I was badly in need of something cheeringly ordinary. Over the previous week there had been a string of approaches from those that – kindly – we must refer to as oddballs. ‘I love women. Thin ones, fat ones, young ones, droopy ones, smooth ones, hairy ones – but especially the hairy ones.’ (Well, that was something, at least.) Closely followed by another message, one that was a lot less practical: ‘This fading world is a mirror of myself dying; I’ll be more alive a thousand years from now than at this moment. Discuss.’ And then: ‘I am interested in the occult, Satanism and Celtic mythology, which will be obvious from looking at my paintings, some jpgs of which are attached.’

Also, there had been a humiliating glass of wine with a man in a city pub. David. David was worryingly good-looking (I’d already lost all faith in my power to attract a handsome man) and he’d only seen strategic photos of my head and shoulders. His face literally fell when he saw me coming towards him in the bar. He spent most of our date acting out a fervent need to listen closely to the live band, and more or less shushing me when I spoke. At the end, out on the pavement, he said, ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ and strode away, smiling. I hate to think about being one of the stories these men tell each other in the locker room. I break out in a cold sweat thinking about my friend Jane, who had text sex with an online suitor, after he sent her links to cottages in Italy he thought they should buy. When finally they met, he went to the bar to get drinks and was never seen again.

Essentially the meeting with Sean was a blind date, though we’d seen each other’s pictures. His showed him: 1) on a boat, manning the helm; 2) with ice in his beard, on Mont Blanc; and 3) in sunglasses, in Spain with a beer. For online males this amounts to a fairly typical spread. My photographs were typical too: one serious face, one smiling one, and three flattering, semi-misleading holiday pictures (tanned and in wrinkle-obliterating light). After a while I’d added a frank head-to-toe one, too. Coincidentally, a certain Jeff wrote demanding properly full-length photographs. ‘Often the women here prove to have fat ankles,’ he said. (We didn’t talk further.) There’s a huge amount of dating site commentary by men reporting that women prove to be ‘fat’, though to some people that merely means ‘eats properly’ or ‘her knees aren’t the biggest part of her leg’.

It’s easy to get in a tizz about your pictures on dating sites. They say the camera doesn’t lie, but that’s a lie. Sometimes it does. It lies because it’s been digitally manipulated, or because its truth is a decade out of date, or because it’s one of those freakish rare shots that glamorise. We all have at least one photograph in which we look like someone else, someone better looking; in my case I’d been told I looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor (I don’t). It’s tempting to use that freakishly good one on your profile, not only for the obvious vain reasons but because the lucky angle with the filter applied offers a little bit of useful anonymity. None of us wants to be accosted in the street by someone exclaiming, ‘Oh my God – aren’t you Bunnykins27, who has a thing about men in linen jackets?’ (I’m not, by the way. And I might, but not more than the average woman.)

So, when I got to the café I found that Sean didn’t look much like his pictures, and nor was he ‘lanky’ either. His photos, he admitted, were fifteen years old. There’s nothing wrong with going bald and acquiring a post-divorce paunch and having teeth like tombstones, but it wasn’t what I was expecting, and so when he approached the café table I didn’t recognise him and told him I was waiting for someone. He was amused: the teeth were unveiled in a faintly alarming smile reminiscent of Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers. But he was nice. He was very nice and I was nice back, and we had a civilised cup of coffee. Afterwards, I said, ‘It was good to meet you,’ and he patted my arm and said, ‘Very best of luck with it.’ We exchanged a smile of mutual understanding and parted.

For a while, my personal statement said that the end of my relationship wasn’t my idea. I thought people would find it reassuring that I wasn’t a dumper but a dumpee. Most men didn’t find it reassuring at all. They preferred women who’d ditched men and were now about to choose them in preference. The spectacle of a dumped woman seemed to trigger something, curiosity and then a rush to judgement, disguised inside a series of questions. There was worry about taking on a woman another man had discarded. ‘What did you do to get dumped? Are you a bitch?’ I mentioned this in an on-screen chat one evening with a man called Neville, and asked what he thought.

‘You may as well give up now,’ he wrote, ‘and withdraw from here and save your money.’ I asked him what he meant. ‘It’s porn that’s your problem,’ he told me. ‘Now that porn is normal, now that it’s normal to look at porn online, that’s the downfall of the middle-aged woman. Men are convinced that if they become bachelors again, that’s the kind of sex life they’ll get. Young women, big tits, flat stomachs, a tight fit where it matters. There are loads of gorgeous young things here who’d be happy with a 50-year-old sugar daddy. You can’t compete with that.’

The question of competition kept coming up. I’d spent most of my life not fretting too much about whether men approved of me, but now I was having to resist scrutinising myself as if through their imagined eyes. I had flashes of self-disgust about the fact that I was so tall, and so big-boned and well-upholstered, and had such big feet. My waist had thickened and How was I going to compete? It was deeply disconcerting. I hadn’t ever seen myself like that, as someone not physically good enough to be loved.

Not having seen profiles written by other women (only women seeking a female partner see them), it was hard to know what the norm was, and how far I deviated from the average. I mentioned this to my friend Jack. Together we went in to my page and blitzed every one of the errors he identified: being whiney, being needy, being pompous and self-aggrandising (that hurt), overly conventional (Radio 4 was tussled over; I won) and too bookish. The argument that it was best to be myself cut little ice. Despite his efforts, despite adding baking, Sundays in London parks, gigs and beer to the list of things I like, I was still, Jack complained, all too evidently an alpha control freak and raging intellectual snob. That was limiting the response types. It was putting people off. It’s important online not to be seen to take yourself too seriously. Men engaged in online dating constantly say how unseriously they take life, as if that’s a good thing. I find it a complete turn-off, but then it’s evident that I have way too many opinions. Having considered the matter, I decided to persist with the accurate, off-putting version of myself. What’s likely to happen if you pretend to be someone else, and attract someone attracted to that imaginary woman? Exactly. It’s not going to end in bliss, is it? The best that could come out of it, it seems to me, is that it would end in a farce that was hilarious to tell other people about, but only ten years later when it ceased to be mortifying.

Jack set up his own dummy page on one of the sites, as an experiment and in the interests of data-collection, and reported back. He advised me not to look at the profiles of my competitors. Too many of them were pert, yoga-doing women with doctorates and waists. ‘There are, like, fifteen of them just in your postcode,’ he said. I decided to make a fake male profile and go and have a look for myself. Jack counselled against. ‘I wouldn’t go there. You’ll delete your page and join a monastery.’

‘A nunnery, you mean.’

‘A nunnery. Though a monastery would be more fun. In any case, how many women have ever looked at your profile, checking out the competition?’

‘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.

Sex and Sensibility

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 to the ‘How are you?’ query is equally bland and meaningless: ‘Fine thanks. You?’ That way, the ball goes back into his court. He was the one who initiated contact, after all. A dating site shouldn’t be a machine that men feed a pound coin into and that delivers entertainment down a chute.

What I did instead, because I was bored, was tell him exactly how I was. It took five paragraphs and a lot of rewrites. At the end of my answer I asked how he was. He didn’t reply. I couldn’t believe it. I’d done it again.

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 liberating quality to being able to behave badly, particularly after a long marriage, and decades of behaving well.

I began using the kind lie quite a bit. It was a way of dealing with being pestered – not for dates, you understand, but for sex. The lie about having just got involved with someone is effective with the sex-pests. It reads, to them, as, ‘You were just too late at the sweet shop, sunshine; sorry.’ The sex-pests are generally attuned to the Man Code (one item of which reads: ‘You don’t shag another man’s woman in an alley’).

I also used the kind lie on the man who had a very particular vision of what his woman would look like (despite closely resembling a fruitbat himself). He went into detail so specific that it even considered her fingernails (short, but shaped, and painted with clear gloss). He wanted to know if I’d consider dyeing my hair red, and whether I was even-tempered. ‘The woman I’m looking for will make me smile continually when we’re together and will ensure that I miss her when we’re apart,’ he wrote. I told him I was in the early stages of talking to someone, and wished him luck. Ordinarily I wished people luck, though I didn’t to the bloke who wrote to assure me that being the bit on the side to a sexless union (his) would prove glorious and liberating. I got his picture back up and stabbed him in the heart with a chopstick.

I’ve had the kind lie used on me, by men who considered themselves out of my league. In one case I knew it was ‘the kind lie’ because I saw the person in question’s online light lit night and day for the next six weeks, as he scoured the listings restlessly for someone better. On one occasion I was caught out doing that myself, by a man I’d delivered the lie to. He called me on it. He’d seen my green light lit for days on end, after I’d said I was only there checking my messages. I felt bad about this. I had to apologise. I had to admit that it was just a useful shorthand. ‘It’s because you’re almost 70,’ I confessed. ‘And you live on the Isle of Wight. It wouldn’t be worth making huge journeys to see one another, because it wouldn’t work: as you say yourself, you don’t read, and you don’t like music and you’re allergic to dogs, and that makes us incompatible. You see, it isn’t better if I give you the real reasons, is it? I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. There’s someone for everyone. Perhaps start with people who live on the same island as you.’

‘Don’t be so fucking patronising,’ he responded.

I went through a period of getting a whole series of approach emails from men over 60, men approaching 70 who were aware that they were fighting the odds. They arrived in such a cluster that I wondered if one of the sites had put me onto a Seniors Site of some sort somewhere (and yes, this does happen – sign up to one outfit and you can find yourself repackaged elsewhere without permission being asked of you). I felt sorry for the men of 69, pretending to be 59, pictured looking caved-in and dejected, in an ill-fitting suit at a wedding, the ex-wife cropped out of the frame. Their way of approaching me was faultless and unappealing. They assured me they were gentlemen, that they were solvent LOL, that they had their own teeth haha, that they loved to travel and wanted a partner to spend their twilight years with. They were unanimously in search of a Lovely Lady. The trouble they were having in looking after themselves was sometimes mentioned, since being widowed, and it was clear that the lady being sought would be kept busy in the kitchen and at the ironing board. Though not all the seniors were merely in search of apple pie. There were plenty who were determined to get laid. I wasn’t charmed when a 75-year-old man told me he wanted to lick me all over. My response to an invitation from a 68-year-old, one written in textspeak – ‘how r u, u luk gr8 to me’ – was, frankly, openly snotty.

‘Was that message even in English?’

‘Love it, love a bitch,’ he wrote. His profile was headed: Looking for a quiet trustworthy woman – does she exist? He went on to say: ‘I should state right away that trousers, jewellery, high heels and makeup do nothing for me.’

I was tempted to tell him that I didn’t think they’d suit him, either.

Sometimes there’s a revealing little nugget hidden in an otherwise bland self-descriptive passage. ‘I have no objection to helping in the kitchen at weekends, but detest dinner parties and draw the line at home-baking.’ (Okey-doke. Well, have fun, won’t you, drawing your line and being single for ever.) ‘I’m widely and well-read, and can be relied on not to make embarrassing remarks in art galleries.’ In a way he was saying the right thing, but it was the way he said it. It wasn’t even that – it was the way I read it. The trouble with the written word is that it has no tone, or humour; there’s no corresponding facial expression. Both statements could have been meant jokingly. Among the sea of Man Vanilla, sometimes a person of strong individual flavour leaps out from the page. Sometimes a statement patently isn’t meant to be funny. ‘I’m looking for someone who has slept with fewer than six men,’ one man declared. ‘Apologies if this seems harsh, but I need someone I can feel morally confident about.’

Sometimes, it’s okay to ignore people.

When I joined a new site, a fairly new site that didn’t charge (yet) to list yourself like an old painting at an auction, I thought I’d hit gold. Zowie! There he was, on page one: Peter, an interesting-looking man, not handsome but interesting-looking, 56, and tall and sturdy in a cricket-playing sort of a way. He worked in education (despite my intended avoidance of men in education, I kept coming back to them, a moth to a flame). He had kind eyes and a nice mouth, a broad face and a big brain and a silvery patina; he had deep smile lines, and an expression of complete and benign friendliness, like a cow that comes to a fence. He was slightly bedraggled, unmaterialistic, disorganised, clever: that was my reading of him, in the lines and between them. I had an immediate feeling, an intuition. I looked at other pictures he’d uploaded: in one of them he had an attractively sceptical expression, and in another an expectant, amused look, like he’d said something mildly outrageous and was hoping I’d find it funny. His profile made me laugh because it was so guileless and rubbish and uncrafted, and he was four inches taller than me. I wrote admiring his writing style and didn’t expect to hear from him.

I got a reply the following morning. ‘Hello to you too,’ he wrote. ‘You look very interesting. I see we have things in common. We probably have mutual friends. What a pity we’re 100 miles apart. But let’s talk some more. As it happens I’m going to be in your neck of the woods in two weeks. Lunch?’

This gave me a thrilling idea. He wasn’t really going to be in my neighbourhood. He made that bit up, because he’d had the same intuition.

At Exciting Date Minus a Week it was proving difficult to think about anything else. I kept looking at Peter’s dating profile, saved onto the laptop, and rereading his emails, as if I’d notice something new, some small detail that would feed my expectation, or undermine it. I needed to know everything. We swapped real-world email addresses, and the letters kept coming, short but regular ones, at coffee pauses in the day and longer in the evening. I Googled him, reassured to see his identity confirmed, and saw him pictured in various online contexts: a slightly creased, almost-handsome, linen-suited academic. He had a bit of a food-loving, France-loving midlife belly, and eyes full of irony and warmth, eyes that hinted at arcane knowledge and originality. Irony, warmth? Arcane knowledge, originality? I was making huge assumptions about him, I was well aware, but couldn’t seem to put a stop to it. He might hate France; he might be well educated and stupid; he might be a wife-beater. I’d taken scant facts and joined the dots. I’d developed my own idea of Peter from the little fragments he’d given and that I’d collated from elsewhere, building up a picture, and Peter, no doubt, was forming his own idea of me. Until we could meet, nothing could really be done about that. It’s what happens. The mind rushes on.

I Googled myself to see what he’d see if he were to search for me. There wasn’t much, certainly nothing controversial, and there weren’t recent photographs, because I’d been hiding from cameras for five years. I was a good deal less slender than I was at 45, but shrank from mentioning this; I mean, why draw people’s attention to something they might not even notice? ‘Oh, PS, just so you know and aren’t surprised, I’m fat and probably sexually undesirable; I’m one of those overreaching overweight midlife women the nameless vampires of the bloke-internet enjoy disdaining. Just so you’re aware.’ So I didn’t mention the weight issue. It would be fine, I decided. I just wouldn’t eat any bread between now and then, and I’d wear a black dress with cunning fat-clamping panels. It would be fine.

Peter said that meeting would be great; meeting would be a hoot. ‘Hoot’ might be a word that signals fundamental unavailability. It might also be a word that brings its own lightness, its lack of expectation: it might be to do with fear of rejection. If events were only a hoot then there wasn’t much to lose. But that was fine. I was also badly in need of a hoot. Hot on the heels of the hoot email, a longer one arrived, one more frank about hope and heartbreak. It turned out that Peter had been married and divorced twice. This gave me pause.

‘So let’s get the nitty gritty over with,’ I wrote. ‘One paragraph on how your marriages came to an end, and then I’ll reciprocate. We’ll indulge ourselves just once in self-pity and then never speak of it again. You first. What did you do, to go and get yourself dumped?’

It turned out that he was the dumper, both times. The reasons were plausible enough: they’d been too young, the first time, and they’d grown apart the second time, and relations with the exes were said to be good. That’s how Peter passed the Dump Test.* (*If a man in consideration was a dumper and not a dumpee, my ears pricked up. If a man was a serial dumper, if he kept getting bored, like a restless kid with too many toys, or if he’d found a string of women sexually dull, there was often a loud buzzing in my ears. If he’d left a woman because she had let herself go, the conversation was probably over.)

This was the beginning of a bout of constant messaging, in which we swapped our sad stories, though we told them to each other in a Woody Allen-style voiceover, competing to see who could be funnier. ‘How are relations with the ex now – amicable enough?’ he wanted to know. Men kept asking me this. Men are somewhat obsessive on the question. Women don’t envisage punch-ups in suburban driveways with jealous ex-wives, but it seems that men do have visions of the reverse case. And of course none of us wants to be with someone with a lot of baggage, that horrible term for stuff about the past that still niggles me. The truth is that we all have stuff in the past that still niggles us. We all need to be with someone who can put their baggage aside, into storage. It can’t be eradicated but it can be left to gather dust.

Peter and I seemed to have equivalent baggage levels, ones that were minimal and undramatic. We both had a residual sadness, one we were confident could be assuaged by another love, by hope. Old sadness had become a new thirst. We agreed that in midlife there is always sadness, and it’s not all about lost relationships. At this point we’re likely to have suffered all sorts of losses – of family and friends, of hopes and dreams, ambitions and plans, of wild ideas and time. A lot of time had gone, never to be recovered. We agreed on all this and then we agreed not to talk about past relationships again, not until we knew each other a lot better. Each of us wanted to draw a line and reinvent life: that’s how we talked to each other, on the fourth day of emailing.

On day four Peter asked if he could have my mobile number. He had something important to ask me, he said. I handed over the number in some trepidation (please, not more deadly, unerotic stockings and heels talk) but there was no need to fear. The question was this: ‘Cryptic crosswords, yes or no?’ I answered – yes! – and asked him in a second text: ‘IKEA, yes or no?’ to which the answer, quite rightly, was, ‘Addicted to the meatballs.’ After this we were off, texting random questions to one another. By day five, dozens of whimsical queries had been sent. Whimsy was the key element. It provided safe and solid foundations. We were developing banter and were going to be friends, even if we weren’t going to be lovers.

Simultaneously via email we began to exchange Top Tens – our top ten films, songs, books, meals, cities, heroes, places, dates to return to in a time machine … you name it, we were Top-Tenning it. I barely had time to work, so intent was I on watching my phone and waiting for its little light to flash.

At the same time a small patch of unacknowledged anxiety had developed a pulse. It wasn’t just my physical self that was being misrepresented in this lead-up, by the sending of out-of-date photographs. In my communications with Peter I wasn’t really me, either, because I’d reframed myself so as to be more attractive to a man who seemed tremendously self-aware and self-possessed, and needed me to be the same. I camouflaged myself so as to attract him. I became, in the letters, the kind of person who could handle most things: charming, cheerful, non-melancholy and staunchly un-neurotic, whose response to the ups and downs was (almost relentlessly) philosophical. I wish I really was her, I thought – that woman Peter’s writing to. Of course it was perfectly possible that he was doing the same ventriloquism, covering up weakness and fear with comedy and wit, so as to impress women with his tremendous psychological health. It could have been a mutual confidence trick; there was no way of knowing. We had no inkling of each other’s complexities. As yet, we hadn’t even spoken on the phone.

One afternoon, his messages began to venture beyond friendship. He texted that he was drinking coffee and about to go into a dull meeting, but was feeling happy because he had me in his life. The die was now cast. Once you go into this territory, and begin to talk ahead of your current reality, there’s no going back. It’s genuinely very hard to resist: it may not seem like it, sitting where you’re sitting (I wouldn’t have believed it either) but it is. Romance, real romance, being courted and wooed, is a thing difficult to say no to. It’s especially difficult when you’re sad. You’re sad, and not very hopeful, and suddenly there’s this wonderful man, clever and witty and kind, telling you that his day has been made better and brighter because he has you in his life. You might find yourself swept up in it, and responding in kind. It’s easy. ‘I’m so glad I have you in my life, too; I have a spring in my step that wasn’t there a week ago, and that’s down to you, Peter.’ When you respond in kind, it’s game on. The trouble is that in many cases game on leads swiftly to game over.

‘I can’t wait to meet you; I can hardly wait,’ he wrote. ‘I’m enjoying this, but I want more. I want a lot more.’ It was clear that it was time to come clean, so I sent him an email confessing to looking my age. His reply was titled SNAP; he said he’d put on a good stone and was considerably greyer than in the site photograph. He didn’t care a jot, not an infinitesimal part of a jot, about my weight, he said. I wrote all this in my dating diary. And I wrote this: ‘I may be in love with him already.’

Because we’d already stepped over the line – not only into the possibility of love but the expectation of it – in the days before meeting we continued to rush things in a way that isn’t wise. We sped ahead far too fast; we were both accelerators, and it got seriously out of hand. Not sexually: we didn’t talk about sex but we were both madly romantic and sure. Some days I got twenty messages, many of them beginning, ‘Hey beautiful’. This bothered me because I’m not beautiful. If he’d decided I was a beauty, I knew that we could both be in a lot of trouble. The communications ratcheted up. I’d get a text saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day,’ and could reply that I’d been the same, because it was true: thinking about him, and composing emails and questions, and answers to questions. And yet, so far we hadn’t even spoken.

Two days before the date he texted that he wanted to hear my voice. I’d avoided the phone, feeling that it was an extra audition that I might fail, and was nervous all day, watching the clock, but needn’t have been. We talked for over two hours, and afterwards he texted that he seemed to be falling in love, though how was that possible? It couldn’t be real, this attachment, he said, but it felt real, and this was all new territory and he didn’t quite know how to navigate it. I confessed that I felt just the same. When he didn’t reply to a text one afternoon, and then didn’t react to a follow-up one asking if all was well, I messaged saying, ‘It’s been four hours since I heard from you and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Is that weird?’ Of course it was weird; it was downright dysfunctional. I’d sit at the computer, trying to work, and really I’d be waiting. I’d smile at the mobile when another of the questions arrived that we continued to ask one another. ‘Do you like Victorian novels?’ ‘Do you ever make bread?’ ‘Do you have any phobias?’

In two short weeks, my life had become Peter-oriented. All the usual procedural stuff – house chores, phone calls, admin, arrangements, seeing friends, the ordinary obligations, and yes, doing the work I was contracted to do – began to feel difficult, even unimportant. I put things off. Others were put on hold. A period of romantic mania gripped me. I was in an altered state, one that was all-consuming. I was constantly, tiresomely upbeat and full of energy. I was of Doris Day-like chirpiness. I laughed easily. I sang as I cleaned the bathroom. I smiled all the way round the supermarket, and made slightly manic chat with checkout operatives. I had become someone who talked to people in the street, if the opportunity arose. I was Pollyanna, relentlessly playing the glad game. This is it, I thought: this is all it takes to be happy – a constant flow of love and attention, given and received. I told myself it didn’t have to come to an end, this flow. I found myself wondering if we’d always text each other these little endearments, even when we lived together. I was genuinely thinking in these terms, but this was somebody I hadn’t even met yet. I was infatuated by the state we had talked ourselves into; each email, each text provided another rush of love sugar. Ego, insecurity, narcissism, fear: they were tangled together like the jewellery I never wore any more.

So, the day of the date arrived.

I was nervous, not least because, owing to the distance, he was staying for the whole weekend. He’d booked a hotel not far from my flat. Our first date was to be a weekend together. This was fine, though, because we were already in love, or so we imagined. I joined him after his meeting, outside a bistro, and our eyes met as I was threading my way through other pedestrians. I’d gone to a lot of effort: a mid-calf black dress with fat-clamping panels had been purchased, and new black boots, and I’d had my hair done. Despite this, Peter’s face registered disappointment that he struggled to hide. His appearance surprised me too. He was broader, greyer and looked older than I was expecting, and he had a weary and anxious air. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed there would be a romantic first contact, a kiss that would set the tone for the day – it felt like we’d already had a lengthy build-up to that – but the hug he offered was a formal one. I stepped back, and looked into his eyes, and his cool blue eyes looked back. I looped an arm around his neck and kissed him on the mouth, a closed-lip kiss, perhaps, though not a great-aunt-at-Christmas dry peck of a kiss. He seemed surprised; he pulled away. We were five minutes into an itinerary involving lunch, strolling, drinks, theatre and dinner, a night and then another day – and it already felt like a disaster. It was a disaster. Things were going to get worse.

Despite the big preamble, our big lead-up, everything we’d shared, the intimacy we’d achieved, Peter and I were strangers. There was no natural resumption of where we’d left off, like old friends who meet after a long time. It was awkward, because we were strangers. We hadn’t expected one another. I had thought I knew him – that had been the illusion we’d both created – but he wasn’t what I’d anticipated at all. I don’t mean in terms of his appearance, but in every other way, in his body language, his natural scent, his demeanour, what he said, the way he spoke, and the look in his eyes when he did so: his whole vibe. He was alien and so was I. I was a woman he hadn’t expected, either, one he knew already that he wouldn’t ever fancy, perhaps, but there wasn’t any easy ducking out. The detail of the day had been gone over and over, and I had theatre tickets in my wallet.

We began with lunch, where, once we’d ordered the food, the conversation immediately flagged. Peter, staring off towards the windows, looked like a boy who’d been kicked hard in the shin, or like a man pleading with the universe to send someone to rescue him. I began to play the straight man, feeding him lines from emails of his that I knew would prompt long anecdotes. He’d worked for a time in the USA, and I asked eager questions about places he’d been, places where he’d felt at home and not felt at home. I was smiling so much that my cheek muscles hurt. Once he felt that I admired him and that he could make me laugh, he began to like me better.

After lunch we had a walk around the city together. We had a perfectly nice, if awkward day, wandering and visiting a museum, and stopping off at coffee shops. Over the third coffee I think he began to sense that I was disappointed; I think he saw that his own disappointment was obvious, and that he hadn’t taken care to disguise it, which was rude, and so he raised his game. Perhaps it had occurred to him that he wouldn’t ever have to see me again, and he was right, of course; he didn’t. Despite its preposterous origins it was, after all, just a date. So he did this mad veering in the other emotional direction. He acted like a man in love. He became almost giddy, when we came out of the café, and wanted to buy me a dress (an offer politely declined). We looked inside churches, like tourists, and he began to walk with his arm hooked around my shoulder. He asked me repeatedly if I was happy, and said repeatedly that he was. It was all becoming quite baffling.

At about five o’clock he said he needed a shower and would return to his hotel, and did I want to come. I said, ‘Sure, why not,’ and went with him, with a man I didn’t really know, on a first date, into his hotel room, because I felt safe, like most murder victims probably do. He made me a coffee and we sat together. It was a fairly lavish affair, his room, with a sofa at the end of the bed. It was possible that he’d picked it in anticipation of a seduction he no longer wanted to go through with. He was keeping his distance, so I had to sidle up to him. There were, at my instigation, short periods of kissing, but they didn’t go anywhere further and it was Peter who broke them off. He made a bumbling speech about liking to take things slowly. He began to have the body language and tone of someone trying to make light of an unsolicited seduction attempt. Perhaps he’d been determined that there would be no physical intimacy, and maybe there were good reasons for that, but I had come to meet him absolutely sure there would be, and each of us surprised the other with our assumptions. I tried to make a joke of it and he made fun of me. It was clear that my assumptions were inappropriate. He said he really must have a shower, and I sat pretending to read yesterday’s paper, while he showered and changed somewhere out of sight. He’d already been there one night, and there was a Jack Reacher novel on the table, and I was surprised because the author hadn’t appeared in his top ten novelists. They’d all been determinedly highbrow. The minute he reappeared he said, ‘Right, let’s be off,’ and we trooped out.

I was deeply confused, at this point. The massive build-up had felt like a series of dates and (this does seem strange, looking back) I’d been sure that we’d be desperate to get our hands on one another. I’d imagined that we might even spend the next morning in bed, enjoying sleepy pillow-talk, face to face. I wanted to get first sex over with, so that it would be the official beginning of us as a couple and we could both stop being nervous, but the signs were that none of what I’d anticipated was going to happen. The signs were that the whole thing was already a failure, and my heart was heavy as we walked along the road together. He said nothing and his face had closed to me.

I was already dreading the evening, but in the end it was survivable. He downed three gin and tonics before we went to the show, and talked about his work, and in the theatre he startled me by reaching for my hand as we sat together in the darkness. Afterwards, over dinner, we talked about Shakespeare we’d seen and favourite box sets, and it was fine, though I had to pedal hard to keep the conversation going. Then, out on the street, he hugged me one-arm style and kissed my hair and said he was tired, and went off to bed. But not before a second attempt on my part. I felt the need to make things worse, which has been a habit of mine, at various times in my life: if things are bad, sometimes I just can’t resist making them a whole lot worse. In this case, my self-esteem had crashed, even faster than the relationship had. I tried to get him to sleep with me, once more. When he was hesitant I said, ‘I’m not going to talk you into this, Peter, obviously.’ (Looking back at this makes me sad.)

His train wasn’t until lunchtime, and we were supposed to be spending the morning together. He texted saying that unfortunately he had to work, so there would only be time for a quick coffee. I met him at a station café. He stood as I approached, but there was no kiss hello. He asked me how I was and said it had all been lovely and we must do it again soon, mustn’t we? I walked with him to the platform, where he said, ‘Bye, love,’ as he got into his carriage, kissing my cheek and not looking back. I went home feeling like a dam that would burst its banks, and had a good cry, because mysteriously the wonderful thing had been all wrong. I told myself that there had been too much for the day to live up to. I’d already had a text from him that said, ‘Well THAT was fun,’ with a smiley attached. The useful thing about emoticons is that they preclude the need for kisses. When the email I expected arrived, it said that he’d been thinking a lot about how difficult it would be to sustain a distance relationship, and how booked up most of his weekends were for the next two months, what with one thing and another.

I’d invested such a lot in this and I wasn’t prepared to let it go, not like that. But when I replied, suggesting we keep in touch, I got a long-winded response explaining that he was too busy to reply. The signs could not have been clearer – the man was virtually wearing a T-shirt with I DO NOT WANT YOU written on it; the man was virtually digging an escape tunnel – but I couldn’t let the episode go, partly because of a profound sense of failure. There were things that had to be said, and I said them, in eloquent letters that were deleted unsent. There wasn’t any point bringing something to a definitive end that might not be absolutely over. Perhaps it was just a blip. There are blips in marriages, after all, so why don’t we allow for the ups and downs, the shadows and light, in emergent relationships too? Why are we so quick to call it a day if things take a chilly turn? People are complicated and their lives have hidden complications, if you don’t know them very well (or indeed at all). I had been the one who’d rushed things on; I’d expected snogging, at the least, and he had resisted me. I think it was his absolute determination not even to kiss me that made me need to humiliate myself. He’d been really, really clear, in some ways, but then he hadn’t been able to stop himself transmitting mixed messages, perhaps out of kindness. And so there was leeway for more self-delusion to take hold. It might not be the end of the relationship, I reasoned; it might just be a rocky beginning. I gave myself this talk and was partly persuaded.

I decided to have another go at resurrecting the situation. I texted Peter the next afternoon and told him I’d eaten too much lunch, a plate of spinach pasta dressed with oil and parmesan shavings, and had fallen asleep on the couch afterwards.

‘You should have anticipated that I was going to do that,’ I wrote jauntily, ‘and stepped in and stopped me.’

‘You need to take responsibility for your own life,’ came the reply. (What the hell? I was just attempting banter with you, Peter. You were supposed to reply in kind. It was silliness. Are men so unused to bantering with women that they think everything they utter is only ever literal?)

Stressed by a peculiar sense of injustice, I went to stay with my mother. Bored on the long train journey, I decided to initiate a text Q and A. Two weeks ago Peter had been mad for a bit of whimsical Q and A. I began with, ‘So when did you last eat cheese?’ I admit I felt a little unwell, a little neurologically unusual. I was exhibiting signs of being just the kind of woman men on dating sites are talking about, when they say, ‘No stalkers or bunny boilers.’ Peter didn’t reply, so I texted again, saying I was on a train and bored, and off to see my mum.

His response was, ‘Have a great trip.’

I texted straight back. ‘Are you okay, is everything okay?’

The phone buzzed a minute later. ‘Lot of work to do, and things on my mind. Talk to you when you get back.’

I couldn’t leave it that long, the not knowing. We had to have a straightforward conversation. But I couldn’t ask the question I wanted to – namely, ‘Is it over, our thing?’ Instead I texted again. ‘Do you like trains and long train journeys?’ He didn’t answer. Forty minutes later, a long, long email about his work travails and tiredness and low mood arrived instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at the end. So that seemed to be that. I felt a kind of relief. It was over, whatever it was. It wasn’t going to drag and dribble on, at least, and there’s a lot to be said for that. But – and I couldn’t help obsessing over this – what was the reason it had failed? We’d had a connection and something had happened to it. It had died. Was it my fault? I wasn’t going to take responsibility for the madness, the twenty million emails, each growing more intimate and rhapsodic, that had preceded the date, because that was absolutely mutual behaviour. But I had the unsettling feeling that somehow or other I was blamed, for bewitching him and then letting him down. For not being pretty, perhaps, or slender, or charming enough, or young for my age, or fascinating. Since meeting me in person, his sense of let-down had been almost palpable.

My poor mother suffered three days of dealing with a lunatic oriented completely towards her phone. I said I seemed to have developed an addictive personality and alarmed her. ‘Not drugs, surely not drugs,’ she said. ‘Please tell me it isn’t drugs.’

‘It isn’t drugs,’ I soothed. ‘I have no interest in drugs, honestly, other than cabernet sauvignon.’

Cabernet sauvignon, or at least the second bottle, was a really bad idea, the kind that seems inspired and brilliant at the time, and makes everything wonderfully clear. Late that night, cabbed up, I wrote a heartfelt email, full of reckless honesty, and went to sleep happy, and woke up shrieking. My mother rushed in, because I was shouting, ‘No, no, no, dear God, please no!’ And yes, the email I had sent him was as bad as I feared, not only needy but borderline unhinged. In general I’d become borderline unhinged. So I sent a second email, which said: ‘Please digitally tear up last night’s drunken ramblings. Like you, I seem to be at a low ebb. It will pass. It’d be nice to see you again, if you’re ever back here. Meanwhile, I wish you all good things.’

A reply came shortly afterwards, saying he’d been tired and overwhelmed with work, and that’s why he’d been so humourless, and that he was sorry. Immediately following this, the phone rang and we talked for a while, about anything and everything, but not about recent weirdness. Afterwards he sent me a text message that said: ‘When we said goodbye just now, I felt like I’d been ripped from your side.’ This, of course, made everything all right. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said to myself. ‘You see, you see!’ It was worth persevering; sometimes good things start badly and this was going to be a prime example. I spent twenty-four hours thinking this, but then received an email from Peter saying that a) I was wonderful and also b) that he didn’t want to see me again.

Once it was properly finished, I looked back on our communication cycle with disbelief. I read it over again and didn’t recognise myself. It looked like an altered state. It was a hard transition, when the love-bombing came to an end, through Adoration Cold Turkey, desperate as a junkie and utterly miserable. But, in the case of imaginary relationships that have their origins online, maybe it was a typical pattern. My guess is that Peter saw immediately we met that the whole thing had been illusory, and if he decided that unfairly early, there isn’t any arguing with it. Intuition and chemistry – they both count for much more than internet dating would have you believe. Setting out to find a compatible person who thinks, talks and lives like you do is all very well, but box-ticking counts for little in the end.

Next, a nice-looking man called Henry wrote to ask if I was ever in Cumbria, because he’d love to invite me to lunch. Henry was 60, and I had to ask myself how I felt about 60, and specifically about being naked with 60. (You may already be saying that this is ageist. I’m just telling you honestly what I thought.) In any case, it wasn’t a qualm that lasted long. Most of us are going to get there, after all, to 60, and we’ll hope to be loved then, whether we have a wrinkly bum or not. I reminded myself that Harrison Ford was now in his seventies; would I say no to Harrison? Reader, I would not. An ex-policeman, Henry was tall and upright, broad-shouldered, and had a knowing look around the eyes, as if he’d been dented by life and had survived and wasn’t going to be a pushover. He was also near-bald, but a middle-aged woman who has issues with hair-loss had better go and buy a stack of jigsaws in readiness for the long nights alone.

He sent a head and shoulders shot that he’d just taken in his kitchen, showing a smiling attractive man in a frayed blue shirt. He was standing in a tiny cottage in the wilds, where he was attempting to live self-sufficiently. His dating site profile was skimpy; when I asked him why it didn’t give much away, he told me that words are meaningless and meetings are everything. After the Peter fiasco it was a view I’d come to have some sympathy for. On the other hand, a woman needs some clues and pointers if she’s going to travel right across England for lunch. He’d volunteered his surname and village, but I couldn’t find him anywhere via Google. I realise this is new-fashioned, but not being able to find someone on the web, not a trace, is a cause of anxiety to me. I’m simultaneously repelled and reassured by people who are bedded in to social media, who can be observed being droll on Twitter, who have many friends on Facebook and are demonstrably non-psychotic there. Henry seemed like a loner. He confessed that he didn’t like the internet; in fact, he loathed the internet and all its workings, he said. He thought it was responsible for a decline in our human culture. It’s an interesting debate but Henry didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. Some things are black and white, he said, and the internet has been bad news for the world, and that’s that. Well, not politically, I don’t think, I ventured; it’s brought people together, in terms of political cohesion, don’t you think? I mean, I think it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t become a voice of the voiceless; at its best it can sidestep news blackouts and bring worthwhile stories forward; it’s been known to threaten tyrannies, and help right wrongs. Henry wasn’t having it. He was, he said, a happy Luddite, and was convinced that humankind would be happier if it followed his lead.

‘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, where people were standing smoking and groups of Friday night revellers were going by. Finn took hold of my lapels and drew me closer – I was in heels and he was quite a bit shorter than me – and said, ‘I know you’re unsure, but I have an idea of something that will make you a lot happier than you are right now.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘what’s that?’

He kissed me softly on the mouth and looked into my eyes, and kissed me again. He said that as it happened he was staying just over the road, at a friend’s flat, and did I want to come up for another glass of wine? I followed him across the street, and up narrow stairs to the second floor. I can’t tell you, convincingly, why it was that I agreed to this. It goes against every safety code, and I didn’t want to, but mysteriously I agreed nonetheless. I most certainly wasn’t going to have sex with him. I’d stick to one glass, and make my excuses and leave. I’d do that, and then later I’d send the text about not wanting to meet again. I’d use a kind lie of some sort. As soon as we’d had that drink.

The flat was small, a one-room studio, and it turned out that the friend wasn’t there; he’d given Finn the key. We were alone and it occurred to me that I might be in danger. I said I was just going to let a friend know where I was, because I hadn’t expected to be late, and then I went into the tiny bathroom and texted the address. When I came out he was sitting at the pull-out table by the bed – it was a studio so the bed was unavoidable – with soft music playing, the blinds down, the lighting dimmed. We had a drink and talked about jazz and then I said I ought to go, and he kissed me again. I didn’t want to kiss him, and the nylony strands of the moustache and beard didn’t add to the fun.

He began to remove my clothes, though for the first few moments I held on tight to the shirt that was being unbuttoned, because I didn’t want to have sex with him. Finn kissed me again and said, ‘Come on, let’s just have pleasure, and not worry about anything,’ and, more out of social embarrassment than anything, not wanting to be a square and no fun and a drag, I let him remove my clothes, and watched as rapidly he shed his own. I didn’t want to have sex with him, and yet I did. I already felt bad about it, and yet I let him continue. It had got to the point at which I didn’t seem able to say, ‘Stop, stop, I don’t want this.’ Of course I was able to say that, but I chose not to, and I know it’s lame to keep saying it was embarrassment that fuelled it, but that’s what it was. It was people-pleasing of an extreme kind. When I put my hands on his back, his skin felt alien and cold. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know this man, and I didn’t want this, and now I just wanted it to be over. I remain ashamed of myself, every time I remember. I’m ashamed of myself and also angry.

After a few minutes of failing to get the angle right he said I should get up onto my knees and face the wall, and so I did what he asked of me, and there was sex, of a sort, a dry and unappetising sort from behind. I was full of self-loathing and disappointment and it was completely humiliating. ‘Look, I’m going to have to go,’ I said eventually. I reached for my clothes and got my underwear on and my shirt and went to the table where my tights and skirt were.

Finn came up behind me and pulled my knickers down and started at me again. ‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ he shrieked. I was leaning forward, over the desk, caught in mid-reach for my clothes. It took him ten seconds to finish (and yes, he was wearing a condom, thank God). He wasn’t interested in whether I might like to have any kind of a finish of my own.

I said, ‘I have to go now, really.’ I put the rest of my clothes on hurriedly, and grabbed my bag and ran down the stairs and onto the street, and ran to the end of it, and walked along the next one wiping tears from my face. A couple stopped and asked me if everything was all right. ‘Bad date,’ I told them. ‘Just a horrible date.’

‘Oh God, we’ve all been there,’ the woman said jovially.

Finn had texted me by the time I got back. ‘Incredible orgasm! What a night! Night night darling xx.’

What? Seriously? It wasn’t possible he was as stupid as this. I didn’t reply. I told a friend what’d happened, and she was shocked and said the situation sounded abusive to her. I couldn’t really argue that, as I’d consented to it all, and hadn’t been coerced at any stage, and had allowed it to happen. But I began to feel as if it had been intended to humiliate, in a sly sort of way. Part of the humiliation, perhaps, was this pretence that there was anything romantic about it.

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