Stella Grey - The Heartfix - An Online Dating Diary

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.

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.