Stella Grey - The Heartfix - An Online Dating Diary

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.