Stella Grey - The Heartfix - An Online Dating Diary

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.

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.