I went away for the weekend to a coastal village with my friend Anna, who is also a divorced mid-lifer. We were going to do a lot of walking and spend our time reading. In the end, we did a bit of walking and spent our time eating. Eating, shopping and reading newspapers in the pub. Anna likes to hear about my romantic encounters in gory detail. She has never done online dating. She didn’t need to. She fell in love with a male friend, and her love is reciprocated, and she makes it all seem so damned simple.
Late on the first night, I got a text from Bill, just as I was nodding off, asking if I wanted to talk. He couldn’t sleep, he said, and, strange though it was to say, he was missing me. This is one of the gifts of the internet revolution. You don’t need to have met someone to feel that you know and like them, and have admitted them to your circle of people.
In the morning when I checked my phone, I’d had an email from Bill, sent at 2am. He was still awake, he wrote, and was imagining I was there with him. We were naked and I’d pressed myself into his back while we were both half-conscious. I’d run my hand down his chest, on to his stomach, and he’d turned to me. It was a long and erotic message. It was quite difficult to concentrate on what Anna was saying over breakfast.
I know of women – successful, midlife, single women – who have more or less settled for phone sex as the relationship part of their lives. They’ve found someone they really like but rarely (if ever) meet in person, someone they can talk to about all sorts of non-sexual things. An intellectual fit is often crucial; in some cases, the sex is almost an optional add-on. It’s sci-fi romance; it’s digital love; it’s roughly equivalent to a friendship that’s entirely played out on social media. Asking if phone-based romances are real isn’t that different from asking if Twitter and Facebook friendships are authentic. It’s quite difficult to argue that they’re not.
A relationship that goes on only at a distance may be a lie, but it’s an easy and delicious lie. If Bill and I never met, we couldn’t really separate. If we didn’t risk physical sex, we couldn’t fail at it. Despite never meeting, we became intimate, and got to know each other’s preferences in bed. It reached the point where we could make each other climax from a standing start in 10 minutes flat. I’m a train and he’s a volcano. He’d work himself up to a pitch and demand to see me soon, in a real-world encounter, and then he’d have an orgasm and let the subject drop. I let the subject drop also. I didn’t have any feelings about being used, or about using someone, because we both chose to be in the bubble.
It was fun, and weirdly mutually supportive, and that was all. We devised a short-term script, a stepping aside from our lives and our romantic travails, and we both enjoyed it hugely, and sometimes that’s enough. Having said that, it wasn’t going to make either of us happy as a long-term habit: we both crave the sense of homecoming, the warm other body in the bed, the heartbeat. We avoided Skype because that eye-to-eye contact is too persuasively but synthetically real. So much is said by the eyes. So much might be revealed, or let slip; so much might prove to be lacking.
We had the conversation the following night. It was just before 1am and I was sitting up in my cottage bed, looking out at the dark sky, the black sea, the lights around the bay. I don’t think we’re going to meet, are we, I said; neither of us thinks this situation will be improved by meeting.
Probably not, he said; it’s been spectacular, but either we’d see that we peaked on the phone, or we’d meet a few times and then have to face up to the fact that neither of us really wants a distance relationship. That being the case, I think this is the last time we do this, I said. Oh God, he said, you’re breaking up with me. You’re not even doing it face to face! We both laughed at this. I agree, he said; I’m sad but I agree. It was time to break up, even though we weren’t really together.
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