Stella Grey - The Heartfix - An Online Dating Diary

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 It lies because it’s been digitally manipulated, or because its truth is a decade out of date, or because it’s one of those freakish rare shots that glamorise.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.